


Girl with a Key

by HeraldAros



Series: The Hatake Riku 'verse [6]
Category: Kingdom Hearts, Naruto
Genre: Action Girl Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Dreamscapes, Earn Your Happy Ending, Gen, Heartless Attacks (Kingdom Hearts), Hurt/Comfort, Keyblade Wielder Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblades (Kingdom Hearts), POV Multiple, Unreliable Narrator, self-endangerment/self-harm, trauma and PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 73,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21785137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeraldAros/pseuds/HeraldAros
Summary: When Heartless attack Destiny Islands, Sora isn't the only survivor to wake up in Traverse Town. Together, he and Kairi will have to figure out what it means to wield the keyblade, how to save the worlds, and how to find Riku when they don't even know where to begin looking.You see, Riku wasn't on Destiny Islands at the time that world fell. (He's inconvenient like that.)Meanwhile, Maleficent has a very different apprentice, and more than one plan she's working on...Best read after the previous stories in the series. OFF HIATUS but updates will be slow as I ease back into this.
Relationships: Kairi & Riku & Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Kairi & Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Riku (Kingdom Hearts) & Tenten (Naruto)
Series: The Hatake Riku 'verse [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/947571
Comments: 101
Kudos: 65





	1. In the beginning, there was darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome, welcome! Whether you're a long-time reader or just finding this series, welcome aboard! We've got a lot of places to see and things to do; we're just getting started. 
> 
> As a birthday present to myself, I'm posting this a bit early. 🎉
> 
> This is where the crossover swings to the Kingdom Hearts side of the pendulum. It is **not** going to be just a retread of the game with extra Kairi flavor. (For one thing, the Maleficent side of the plot is going to be _very_ different...) Naruto characters and plotlines will be mentioned more than featured, with a few exceptions.
> 
> This fic is going to stay Gen, and the T rating is for violence that's typical to Naruto canon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** Violence, minor injuries, blood.

Kairi wakes up when something licks her cheek. She groans, the sound echoed a moment later by Sora, right next to her ear. As she blinks, the world comes into focus slowly: cobblestones, brickwork, a night sky. A yellow dog pants beside her face, giving her a big doggy grin.

“Huh? …Kairi?”

She turns her head, realizes she’s collapsed on top of Sora, and pulls herself to her feet with all due speed. She offers him a hand up, which he takes. As they look around the alley they’ve found themselves in, Kairi sees the dog slip off, but she can’t spare any energy now to be concerned about that.

It was a cute dog, though.

“Do you know where we are?” she asks. Her knuckles are bruised, her knees skinned. Sora’s, too, when she looks him over.

“No idea.” He swallows. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice is small, trembling, her words somewhere between a lie and the truth. She doesn’t know. She has a suspicion. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“We were fighting that big monster. And then…we beat it, didn’t we?”

Kairi nods, clenches her hands together in front of her. “Yes. Well. Maybe? It got sucked up into the sky, didn’t it?”

“Yeah! And then we did, too.”

“And you didn’t let go.” Kairi smiles and impulsively leans forward to pull him into a hug. “Thank you, Sora.”

He hugs back. “Well, of course I didn’t. And now we’re…wherever we are, together. What is this place, do you think?”

Kairi swallows again as she pulls away, eyes downcast. “I think… I think this is another world, Sora.” She forces herself to look up, to see his reaction.

He blinks at that, then his eyes widen. “Wha—are you serious? Is it where you’re from? Do you recognize it?”

“No.” She shakes her head to underscore that—she’s very sure this isn’t where she grew up, although where that surety comes from, she couldn’t say. “It’s just…a feeling I have. Doesn’t this place feel different to you? Like when we went to Konoha? That felt different.”

Sora just shrugs, raising his hands to lay them on the back of his head. “I guess so? I don’t really get that kinda stuff, though. Hey, maybe that’s a special power you have!” He looks inordinately pleased at this idea.

Kairi shakes her head. “Maybe. I think we should look around. If there are dogs here, there might be people. Maybe someone can tell us where we are.”

“Maybe we can figure out a way to get back to the Islands,” Sora suggests, as they head out of the alley.

Afraid that won’t be possible, Kairi counters with, “Or a way to get back to Konoha, to see Riku.”

Sora’s eyes go big again. “Oh yeah! And then, once we find him, we can go looking for your world, just like we said we would!”

Kairi giggles. “Oh, Sora. Trust you to remember that promise at a time like this.”

“Thanks! I think.” Pause. “Wait. That’s a good thing, right, Kairi? Right?”

Still giggling, Kairi leads the way out of the alley and into a city center. There are bright yellow neon signs, faintly buzzing, advertising different shops. Streetlamps, windows, and open doors all spill orange light over the square. A few people mill around, a few more eat quiet meals at tables at a patio restaurant.

Sora stops next to her, surveying the same scene. “Let’s ask around,” he suggests, with none of the hesitation Kairi feels.

They do, but no one can tell them much. The adults look sympathetic; the few kids seem just as confused as them. All Sora manages to get out of anyone is the name of this place—Traverse Town—and the general advice to stay in this square.

“You’ll need a place to stay,” one of the adults, standing in front of the restaurant, tuts at them. “Hm… The Hotel used to be safe, but now, I’m not sure. Maybe Leon will know…”

“Who’s Leon?” Kairi asks, latching onto the name of someone who sounds helpful.

The woman eyes them and sighs. “But then again, maybe not…” And she doesn’t seem eager to tell them more, just sighing and huffing and staring at them with big, sad eyes.

Sora and Kairi edge away from her. She doesn’t stop them.

They poke their heads into a few other places, the most welcoming of which is the Accessory Shop. It’s bright inside, and warm, and as Kairi eases her way through the door, a gruff, friendly voice says, “Hey there, how can I… Aw, it’s only a kid.” A pause, as Sora follows her inside. “Two kids.”

The man is Cid, a tall, blond guy with big hands and the same kind of attitude that Tidus’s dad has. He fills them in and seems a little impressed at what they already know (which isn’t at all impressive in Kairi’s opinion, but given the conversations they’ve had so far, inquisitiveness isn’t common around here).

Everything he has for sale is far, far out of their budget. Neither Kairi nor Sora brought their wallets to the end of their world.

Cid takes one look at their cuts and bruises and, with much snorting and huffing, pulls out a couple potions and makes them take turns sitting on the counter so he can apply them topically.

While he pours potion into a washcloth and dabs it liberally on scabs, claw marks, and bruises both new and old, he confirms that Leon would be a good person to ask about a place to stay, but doesn’t know where they can find Leon. “Sometimes he’s in the Second District,” Cid says slowly, “but that’s damn near overrun.” A pause. “Sorry.”

Sora groans, loud and long, cut off only when Kairi elbows him in the ribs. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see if we can find him. Thanks for everything!”

“That wasn’t what I—hey, wait, get back here!”

They ignore him, and he doesn’t chase them, so he must not feel too strongly about it. A kid next to a streetlamp lets them know that the Second District is through a giant gate, though he too warns them it “isn’t safe.”

The big doors open easily enough when they both push on them.

“Are you sure we should go over here?” Kairi asks as they step out into a district with much bluer lighting. It feels colder, darker, more sinister. “Maybe we should just go back…”

“Aw, Kairi, where’s your sense of ad—”

A scream cuts Sora off, and a middle-aged man falls to the ground right in front of him, an armored, shadowy monster crouched over him. A flash of light explodes from the man’s chest, followed shortly by a pretty pink crystalline heart, like someone’s Valentine.

The monster eats it, then disappears in a swirl of darkness, black tinged with purple. The man’s body fades into sparkles the same color, only to be replaced by one of the shadow-monsters Kairi and Sora fought on the Islands.

Without either of them saying anything, their keys form in their hands. Kairi looks from the monster to it and back.

Sora doesn’t hesitate, just lashes out at the monster and the nasty little friends that join it, shouting out in hurt and rage. Kairi joins him, swallowing down nausea and fear in favor of a similar, slow-burning anger.

These things… They gobbled up the Destiny Islands, didn’t they? And now they’re here, gobbling up even more.

Under Kairi’s key (part of the hilt looks like a wave and the little charm on the end is a paopu fruit; it’s like she’s carrying a piece of the Islands with her still), the monsters dissipate in sparks and more crystalline hearts. Sora’s key bashes them into sparks and hearts, too.

Once the monsters are all gone, Kairi turns to Sora. “I don’t like this,” she says.

“We can go back,” he says, and Kairi’s fingers clench around the hilt of her key.

It feels right in her hand, the way the wooden training sword she borrowed from Riku never did. It isn’t heavy. It fits.

“Let’s keep going,” she says.

⁂

There are shops in this section of the city, too, but they seem abandoned, for all that the displays in the windows are still stocked and lit. The doors are locked, but one tap of Kairi’s key fixes that for the first shop they come across.

The unlit sign above it proclaims Boots & Shoes. Inside, the shelves and racks are disordered, footwear strewn across the floor. As they step inside, more shadows form, and the fight makes an even bigger mess.

When the shadows disappear, they leave behind munny. Kairi and Sora scoop it up, then turn in sync to look at the cash register.

“That would be too much,” Kairi says, with no small amount of regret. Cid had a really pretty, really expensive ring in stock that she picked up four different times, only to set it down because one thousand munny is a lot.

“Yeah,” Sora says, also regretfully.

Kairi’s stomach growls and she flushes. Sora sends her a worried look, but she waves him off. He shoots another look at the register, so she steers him out the door with a hand on his wrist.

There are more weird-looking buildings, but after the disappointment of the first one, they don’t even bother. Instead, they retrace their steps and go back to the square and Cid’s shop. He looks up quickly as they step in.

“Didn’t find him?” They shake their heads. “Keep your chins up. I’d tell you to take another look around, but it looks like you two got munched by the first look.” He critically examines them and lets them get away with just drinking one more potion each. “You went into the Second District, didn’t you? Kids these days. Stick to the First District this time, will ya? Nothin’ good comes from poking around the Heartless. _Trust_ me.”

“Is that what those things are called?” Kairi asks, knees tingling with restorative potion goodness. Riku would warn her that potions only go surface-deep, but if there’s bruising underneath, she can’t feel it as she swings her legs out in front of her. “Heartless?”

“That’s right. Stay away from ‘em!” He whirls on Sora. “You too!”

They make him some empty promises that he takes suspiciously before they slip back out, this time with a ring apiece. Kairi’s is red, Sora’s blue, and Cid swears they’re magic, but they don’t _feel_ like magic.

They cost a good chunk of munny, too, but Cid wouldn’t trick them. Probably.

The square, when they step back out, seems deserted. All the tables at the restaurant are empty, and the handful of milling people have all disappeared. It’s _eerie_ , almost as bad as the Islands when—

“Where did they _go_?” Sora asks, an edge of panic in his voice, too.

They look around for someone, anyone, and Kairi’s about to suggest they ask Cid to let them sleep on his couch or floor or _something_ when a voice sounds out behind them: “They’ll come at you out of nowhere.”

Spooked, both Kairi and Sora whirl around with keys in hand.

The man is tall, younger than Cid or their parents, with a weapon at his hip and a scar across his face. His eyes are cold as they flick from Kairi to Sora.

“And they'll keep on coming at you, as long as you continue to wield the keyblade. But why? Why would it choose kids like you?”

“Hey,” Sora protests, “what’s that supposed to mean?”

Kairi wants to shush him, but they have to present a united front. This guy looks _dangerous_.

“Never mind,” the man says, sounding exasperated. “Now, let me see that keyblade.”

Sora starts to say something else, but Kairi cuts him off by extending her own key—keyblade?—toward him, point first.

“There,” she says. “You’re looking at it.”

If anything, he seems more exasperated after that, although he does step toward them, hand extended. Kairi waits, and when he’s just out of reach, she tells the key to go with a thought and crosses her arms over her chest. Sora, next to her, sends his key away, too.

“My mom always said,” Kairi tells the man, since apparently, he’s deficient in manners, “that you look with your _eyes_ , not with your _hands_.”

The man stares at her, one eye faintly twitching. Kairi smirks at him.

“Show me the keyblade,” he demands.

Sora says, “You already saw it,” and when the man turns his glare on Sora, Sora matches it, hands on his hips like his mother. “You didn’t even say _please_.”

“You’re being _really_ rude,” Kairi adds. “Maybe the keyblade chose us because we have _manners_.”

The man groans and brings one hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Ugh. Whatever. Come with me.” And he starts to head to the Second District.

Sora shoots Kairi a raised eyebrow look, silently asking whether they’re gonna follow. Kairi scowls and shakes her head, arms still crossed over her chest. She does wheel around, though, to meet the man’s aggravated frown.

“Come _on_ ,” he says, gesturing to the big gate.

“Cid said not to go in there,” Kairi tells him. “And Cid patched us up. _You_ just insulted us. I’m not going anywhere with you.” And she marches herself right back to the Accessory Shop, Sora following behind and stifling his laughter poorly, the man trailing even farther behind.

⁂

Cid, for what it’s worth, asks, “Back already?” when Kairi pushes the door open and walks straight over to him, Sora on her heels. He laughs outright when the man follows them in.

“Well, looks like you found Leon.”

Kairi frowns at both men. “He’s really rude,” she says bluntly.

Cid guffaws, leaning over onto the counter and slapping it a few times—more when Leon says, in all apparent sincerity, “ _You_ _’re_ rude.”

⁂

Eventually, Cid closes the shop, turning off the neon lights and pulling the shutters closed before leading them out to the Second District. “Heartless don’t attack groups much,” he says, Sora on one side, Kairi on the other, Leon sullenly bringing up the rear. “Doesn’t make it totally safe, but it’s better than wandering around on yer own.”

“We had each other,” Sora says, and Cid grumbles at that.

“They have keyblades,” Leon says, and at _that_ , Cid stutters to a halt, turning his head to shoot Leon a scrutinizing look before turning it on Sora and then Kairi. “ _Both_ of them.”

“How’d kids like _you_ manage that?”

“I think I’m offended,” Kairi says, because Sora’s cheeks are starting to puff out and his face has gone red, but she _likes_ Cid, and if she gets there first, Sora maybe won’t explode at him. “What’s that mean, kids like us?”

“Brats,” Leon and Cid say at the same time, only Leon’s serious and Cid laughs at Sora’s expression and adds, “Young.”

Kairi almost says something about Riku being younger when he gave them the key—sees the same comment in Sora’s open mouth—and decides, last-second, that they don’t need to know about that. _Especially_ not Leon, who will just go even more lemon-faced if he finds out a _third_ kid has a key. So instead, she asks, over the top of Sora’s comment, “Why are we going to the Second District?”

Cid grunts, resumes walking. “Hotel’s there. Aerith can fill you in. Better’n leaving it to _him_ ,” and he jerks a thumb at Leon.

⁂

In the end, this “Aerith” is busy with some other people, so Cid and Leon stumble their way through explaining about other worlds, and how the Heartless are eating them, and the Heartless come out of the darkness in people’s hearts and the keyblade’s the only thing that can stop them.

That makes Leon’s attitude make more sense, Kairi supposes. It doesn’t _excuse_ him, though. A grown man should behave better.

They’re interrupted by a Heartless appearing _in the room_ , and Cid leaves to warn Aerith while Leon chases it out the window, a thousand times more graceful than Riku’s ever pulled that maneuver off.

Kairi and Sora body flicker after him, climbing down a lot more carefully and landing down in a new area.

There, Leon tells them to “not bother with the small fry, just find the leader!” Then he _runs off_ , leaving them to fight through half a dozen Heartless that have _armor_. Hitting the armor with her key jolts all the way through Kairi’s arm, more visceral than the way hitting wooden poles or dummies jolts through her.

The first time, it throws her back, stumbling and losing her footing into a pool of water. Kairi goes down, right on her butt, and between the gross water and her skinned palms and her smarting pride, she freezes for a few heartbeats. Part of her wants to cry. She and Sora are near-evenly matched these days, and here she is, fallen into dirty water and sniffling while he mops up the last of the Heartless and collects the munny they leave behind, calm as if he was crab-hunting on the Islands.

It isn’t _fair_. Nothing’s fair. Kairi pulls her knees up, almost presses her face into them, and instead pushes herself up.

“Kairi?” Sora sounds worried now; looks it, too, when she meets his eyes. “You okay?” He offers her a hand up, out of the water pit or whatever it is.

“I’m fine,” she says, sniffing just a little. She doesn’t say she just wants to go home—though she thinks it. “Let’s go.”

When they encounter more of the armored Heartless, Kairi goes after them with a vengeance, stabbing at the softer parts of them and ignoring how her sneakers squelch on the pavement. Her clothes stick to her, but she’s run laps around Sora straight out of the ocean, so that’s no hindrance. Her eyes start to burn, but she wipes at them quickly and tells herself that’s just the water dripping into them from her bangs.

⁂

They fight their way _back_ through the Second District, somehow restocked with Heartless since they cleared it out less than an hour ago, and into the Third, trying to find Leon or any sign of this “leader-Heartless.” Along the way, some of the Heartless drop potions and chains identical to the ones Cid sold, which they divvy up between themselves.

The Heartless drop other, less useful things, too: weirdly glowing bits and bobs that Sora ferrets away into his deep pockets. They give Kairi the creeps, so she lets him hang onto all of those. They also take breaks to use the healing spell Riku taught them (so as not to cut into their potion stores).

Then Kairi hears a commotion and stops short, while Sora keeps going. He winds up clobbered by two catapulted bodies, one tiny and feathered, the other large and person-shaped.

Both bodies shout, “The key!” when they see that Sora’s got one, but whatever interest they have in it has to wait, because a dozen armored Heartless appear, limbs moving in inhuman little twitches, soulless yellow eyes focusing on the four in front of them.

Kairi doesn’t wait for Sora; she throws herself at the one nearest her with a war-cry, wordless and packed with all her outrage, all her hurt and fear. She pulls her key back and swings, mindful of her footing.

Riku only comes by the Islands about once a month, and not even at consistent intervals, but when he does, he stresses the basics. He makes her and Sora show him that they still remember everything before he teaches them anything new, more implacable than any of their teachers.

She’s had to prove she knows how to fall without hurting herself, how to stand, even how to breathe correctly. She’s had to demonstrate her form on push-ups, pull-ups, and squats. She’s run up and down the beach more times than she can count under Riku’s assessing gaze.

Once, she asked him why he goes over all that every single time, and he paused for a few seconds before saying, “If anything ever does happen, you two need to know this. You can’t stop to think about it.”

Now, Kairi doesn’t need to stop, to think. She knows how to hold herself and her keyblade muscle-deep, bone-deep: her feet don’t falter, don’t slip. She keeps a solid stance as she moves, makes sure she’s grounded before she winds up her swing and unleashes it right into the middle of the first Heartless’s smug, awful face.

That one swing strikes true, and the Heartless explodes into sparkles.

The next few don’t go down so easily; Kairi blocks claws more than once in between attacks of her own. Meanwhile, Sora and the other two have pulled themselves up and joined the fight; Sora with his own key, the bigger stranger with a round shield that he thrusts in front of him, and the duck with…

“Is that magic?” Kairi shouts, torn between awe and envy. The duck is tossing fireballs at the Heartless. _She_ wants to toss fireballs at the Heartless!

(Riku gets cagey every time Kairi or Sora bring up learning any of the cool jutsu he’s mentioned, like bolts of lightning or illusions. Kairi’s never been sure whether that’s because he doesn’t actually know anything like that well enough to teach it, or because he doesn’t trust them.)

“Of course!” The duck sounds indignant. He also has a bit of a lisp. Because of the beak?

Kairi’s inattention earns her a swipe on her bare shin, deep and painful, and she yelps and kicks the Heartless away from her on instinct, the impact jarring her foot and pushing the Heartless only a couple of inches back.

The bigger stranger—his head is dog-shaped, that’s so weird—rushes in, planting his shield in that Heartless’s face and smashing it into the ground. Then he turns to Kairi, eyes dropping to her bleeding leg. He rustles in his pocket for a moment, produces a potion, and offers it to her.

“Here ya go,” he says.

She takes it, splashing the liquid on her cut before looking around for another Heartless. Sora mops up a couple and the duck explodes the last free one with a squawk.

That’s when the huge floating armor Heartless descends.

It has four limbs, one big chest piece, a floating ball of a head, and no chill. Hitting it is like hitting a fridge: dull metal clang, little visible effect. Sometimes, a particularly good hit—usually, Kairi won’t lie, from one of the duck’s fireballs—makes it stutter backward, or drop all its parts in a heap on the ground.

When it’s up, it tries to stomp on them with its big feet. It also launches its arms at them. Those arms can zoom around, and Kairi finds herself dropping her key several times to form the hand-seal for a last-second body flicker to just put enough space between the giant metal fist and herself.

Sora does a little better, hunkering down and relentlessly swinging at one leg until the duck knocks the Heartless into a pile of parts, at which point Sora bashes the leg until it explodes into sparks. Then he moves onto the next one.

The big stranger, meanwhile, notices Kairi’s problem and puts himself between her and the arm, knocking it aside when it gets too close. When the Heartless collapses, Kairi takes the opportunity to dart in and bash at that arm; it picks itself up before she can destroy it, but even without visible proof, she thinks she hurt it.

With the big stranger shielding her from getting pancaked, Kairi doesn’t retreat again, pulling back only enough to let that shield absorb a blow before pushing forward and stabbing or swinging. It takes another dozen strikes, dancing back and then jabbing forward, before the arm goes away.

In the meantime, Sora and the duck get rid of the other leg and the other arm. Kairi frowns. She’s slightly ahead of Sora in their duels; she should be the one doing more damage to this thing.

Just the head and body left, and it starts to throw itself around. Kairi flinches back, and the big stranger is there, shield up. “Don’t worry, a-hyuck,” he says, “I won’t let ‘im get ya.”

Kairi nods at him, tries for a smile, and surveys the situation. The duck seems to be out of fireballs, instead swinging his little staff at the body and squawking in pain and rage when the torso smashes into him. Sora is better at getting out of the way but can’t reach the head.

She turns back to the stranger, dismissing her key. “Think you can give me a lift? So I can hit the head?”

The stranger eyes her, then the Heartless, then lifts his shield.

Kairi nods, backs up to get a running start, and jumps onto the shield. The stranger hefts her, and, while airborne, she pulls her key out of thin air. She lands on the Heartless’s head key-first.

The blow rings out, even as Kairi starts to slip, unable to find her footing on what turns out to be an empty chest of armor. She’s never been the best at sticking herself to things with chakra, and right now, her sneakers fumble, one foot slipping into the armor and the other sliding down the outside.

Kairi makes a split-second decision and throws herself forward, key once again disappearing as she flings her arms out to grab the giant metal ball of a head in front of her.

It lifts itself up, out of her reach, and she only just manages to catch the other side of the armor. Her arms cushion her face, but the rest of her body slams into the metal wall on the inside of the armor’s back, bruises feet slipping as she tries to find purchase.

“Kairi!” Sora calls out, sounding panicked. “Kairi! Are you okay? Kairi!”

“I’m fine,” Kairi shouts back. “I’m coming down!”

The armor is hovering maybe eight feet off the ground. Kairi takes a deep breath and lets go, pushing chakra into her feet.

The impact still jars her, shaking up through her bones, but she doesn’t sprain or break anything as she lands in a crouch and then rolls out from under the armor before it can try to squish her.

And it does try, but Sora blocks it, his key in the middle guard that Riku declared “passable;” then the stranger with the shield pushes the Heartless away and the duck throws a fireball and Kairi gets her feet under her and springs up, stabs at the Heartless, Sora’s key joining hers a moment later.

The Heartless shudders and goes still, one giant crystalline heart rising slowly out of the empty neck as the torso and chest dissipate into now-familiar sparks.

⁂

Donald and Goofy want either Sora or Kairi to go with them.

Wait, no. Scratch that. Donald and Goofy want a keyblade to go with them and aren’t picky about who brings it.

The ship—ship!—they have only has room for three, they say. Besides, their King (king!) only mentioned a single key. They don’t need both kids. Whoever they don’t take can stay here, safe, with Cid and sulky Leon and the mysterious Aerith and the bouncy girl whose name Kairi hasn’t caught yet, who turned up with Leon to wish the leavers a good journey.

Kairi takes one look at Sora’s shining face and knows she can’t ask him to stay. He’s beaming, eyes wide and stars in them at the very idea of exploring new worlds. Even the duck’s bad temper can’t bring him down.

Part of Kairi is relieved. She can tell Sora to go and he will. He’ll be happy. He’ll be so happy, and safe enough with Donald and Goofy looking after him, and Kairi can stay here and hang out at Cid’s shop and wander around the Second District and bash Heartless in with her keyblade when she gets too bored.

Sora will be happy, and Kairi will be safe. Everything works out. Sora will come back to her with stories of all the worlds he’s seen. It’ll be just like on the Islands, keeping herself busy while she waited for Riku to come back.

—But. Riku. Sora will go explore other worlds looking for Riku, and Kairi will stay here, where Riku isn’t. Unlike the Islands, she won’t have Sora to keep her company. Sure, Cid’s been nice, but she barely knows the guy. She’s already seen what there is to see of Traverse Town, and she’s already bored. And she’s going to stay here, and let Sora run off and see all sorts of new things, meet new people, track Riku down and be the first one he sees?

For a solid minute, Donald tells them all the reasons why only one of them can go and Kairi listens to him, imagines what that will be like. For a minute, Kairi considers saying yes, thinks she will say yes, braces herself for that.

And then she looks at Sora again, at his shining eyes and his smiling face, and he says, “Kairi, we can go to other worlds,” having clearly paid zero attention to the duck at all.

She smiles back at him. “Yeah, we can.” And then she turns to Donald and Goofy and says, “We’ll make room. Sora and I go together.” Impulsively, she grabs Sora’s hand; he squeezes hers and squares his shoulders, nodding.

“We go together.”

* * *

Riku should’ve noticed something was wrong a lot sooner. It wouldn’t have changed much, but he might have felt better if he hadn’t been caught off-guard.

He and Tenten set out from Konoha in what they could generously name “predawn,” and more ungenerously might call “still basically night outside, guys, go back to bed.” Their paperwork is all in order from the day before, bags packed, friends informed, and they’re both early risers, so they didn’t think anything of leaving that early, waving at the two chuunin on the graveyard gate shift.

They don’t try to race one another—after about four months in the courier corps, Riku would win that one, even though Tenten’s stamina is still better than his. Between his increased pace, the length of ground he can cover with each body flicker jutsu (close to a hundred fifty meters when he isn’t pushing himself, now!), and the number of times he can perform the jutsu in succession, there would be no contest.

Without chakra, Riku wins in a sprint and Tenten in a marathon, but with it, he has her beat all around. They both know how they measure against one another, so a contest would be pointless. With body flicker, Riku’s even been able to claim victory over _Lee_ in a sprint, although it was only one time, and not since Lee made chuunin.

Rather than sprint the whole way, Riku and Tenten keep an even, measured pace, slow enough to keep track of their surroundings, fast enough that they may make it to Riku’s mom’s house for lunch. That’s still hours off, though, and Riku’s thoughts are full of what he’s going to say to Sora and Kairi, how he can spend the short three-day reprieve from missions and training that Tsunade cleared him for.

No Konoha means no Kakashi and no Cat. Between the two of them, Riku’s stays in the village are less restful than his actual missions.

(Kakashi surprises him with jump-scares, leaping off rooftops or out of shadows, tossing harmless objects at him from weird angles and declaring, “Well, now you’re dead,” if Riku doesn’t dodge in time.

Riku didn’t realize Cat was involved at first, but there are only so many times he can pick up on the man’s scent while banging into low-hanging branches he’s never encountered before, or tripping over tree roots that weren’t there last week, or being shoved from behind into the corner of a building, a random stall, or the river at freezing cold o’clock. Not to mention the random objects he’s found in his packs—acorns, dried leaves, flower petals—that all say _someone else got into my stuff without me noticing_.

Given that Kakashi’s a jounin and Cat’s an _ANBU_ , he doesn’t think any of this is fair, but scanning his surroundings with growing paranoia has cut down on all these instances. He’s also developed a permanent tension headache entirely thanks to them, and the only solution is to get away from Konoha for a bit, and thankfully, Tsunade approved.)

The forecast is sunny, but it’s hard to pick clouds out of the early morning sky. Riku’s used to running in the dark, to picking his path out from scattered starlight and his other senses; Tenten falls in behind him when they hit the forest, her sandals tracing his own footprints.

An hour before dawn, they pause for water, Tenten with her back to the trunk and Riku sinking to an easy crouch toward the middle, where he has sightlines on three different escape routes, should anyone try to attack them.

Tenten says, “The forest is really quiet at night,” in a hushed voice.

Riku shrugs, capping his water and returning it to a pouch. “The birds will wake up soon. If we’re fast, we might beat them to the temple.”

Tenten grins. “Is that a challenge?”

“If you think you’re up to it.”

“Oh, you’re on.”

They move, not really racing so much as pushing themselves. In the heart of Fire Country, stealth shouldn’t be a concern, but this is technically a classified mission, for Tenten at least. The location of the Fire Temple is an open secret, but the fact that Hatake Riku has any business near it is so classified, it isn’t written anywhere.

They won’t stop at the temple; they’re going to cut south and loop around, confusing any surveillance. Neither Tenten nor Riku are fabulous trackers, but Riku’s genjutsu is good enough to confuse the average tail, and Tenten’s planning to drop some countersurveillance seals when they get closer to their destination.

(Riku and Hinata helped her design a couple, since genjutsu isn’t her specialty and Miss Kurenai was busy working with Kiba and Shino. Yakumo offered to help, but the way she constructs genjutsu is too idiosyncratic for Tenten to translate into seals.)

When they stop next, Tenten glances up with a frown. “It should be light by now,” she says.

Riku jumps up three branches, but even as the foliage thins, the sky stays dark, swarming with thunderclouds. He eyes them, dread building in his gut, before he flickers down to Tenten.

“Storm,” is all he says, and now that he’s seen the clouds, he can smell something sharp and acrid, even through his mask. The mask filters most scents out, so if he’s smelling it, Tenten ought to be choking on it. She isn’t, though. “Do you smell that?”

She shakes her head, but before she can ask about it, Cat lands in between them.

Both chuunin stand at attention instantly, on alert. ANBU don’t reveal themselves like that unnecessarily. (Riku habitually forgets that he even has an ANBU babysitter; he doesn’t, on missions, but when he’s in the village, Tsunade arranges to have someone watch him—watch over him, she would say—to make sure Orochimaru doesn’t kidnap him, or deliver any more presents. He thought Tenten was his only babysitter on this trip to the Islands, but either he was wrong or Cat was sent from the village, which would be _worse_.)

They pull out weapons—Riku his staff, Tenten her whole armory scroll, hand hovering over the variety of seals—not a moment too soon. As they glance around, shadows gather at the base of the tree, then dart upward.

Riku jerks away from one that moves under his feet, leaping onto another large branch only to find three there. They coagulate, pulling themselves quickly off the surface of the branch, making monster-sized, ant-like shapes.

The familiarity twangs in the back of his head, but it isn’t until Riku’s smashed half a dozen of them and watched them reform beneath his staff that he remembers: a year and a half ago, give or take a month, he was knocked out during the first Chuunin Exams he attended and woke up in the first of the strange dreams that have plagued him ever since.

The shadows were only in that first nightmare, though.

He picked the forehead-protector, like the one on his head now, and sacrificed the sword, and had to fight shadows like these barehanded. Those at least had the decency to disappear when he punched them. These just ooze back into shape and attack him again.

When their claws connect, he bleeds; a few bite him, when he focuses on other shadow-monsters and doesn’t notice the ones slinking around behind him. Tenten and Cat have similar problems, as Cat jumps down to the ground and calls out, “To me!”

Tenten and Riku go; not only is Cat their superior, he’s also the strongest of the three of them, and the most experienced. Whatever his plan is, Riku wants to hear it.

“I’m going to lead them off,” Cat says grimly, as more shadows form, surrounding them. “You two will wait, then run as fast as you can to the temple. There are fortifications in the gate; you should be safe there.”

“What about you?” Tenten asks, a stubborn look on her face.

She and Riku both know the unspoken part of Cat’s plan, and Tenten clearly isn’t about to accept it. She’s going to make him say it, then argue with him until the shadows slice them all to shreds.

Riku isn’t about to stop her, though. It goes against some deep part of him to let someone take on that risk on their own. Ninja are supposed to put the mission first, but Tenten’s mission right now _is_ Riku, and he’ll back her rather than leave anyone behind to fight these monsters alone.

Absently, Riku raises a hand to the necklace, for once over his shirt. Kairi called it her good-luck charm, told him it was the symbol of his promise to see her again. She’d said it would protect him, and she’d been joking, of course, but Riku wishes, for a long, bleak moment, that it had been more than that.

The shadows strike at that moment, from five different angles; the discussion pauses as they all push the shadows back. Riku slams his staff into one, two, three with little resistance; Tenten tosses handfuls of knives and shuriken before following with a series of sword-strikes. Cat mostly sticks to hand-to-hand, although he weaves hand-seals in between punches and kicks.

Roots yank out of the ground and pulverize a dozen shadows, and Riku would cheer or at least feel vindicated, but they’re replaced by at least twenty more, crawling over the upraised roots, ducking under them, leaping off them to attack from above…

Painstakingly, they push back hard enough to get some breathing room; not enough for a lengthy conversation, but precious seconds in between attacks from the shadows.

“You need to go!” Cat tells them, angry, not visibly injured.

“Not without you!” Tenten looks fierce, sharing her glare out between Cat and the shadows equally.

Cat’s response is not to argue further. After a few more seconds of hasty guarding—one of the shadows leaps over Tenten and gets Riku on its way down, goes straight through his sleeve and leaves a gash on his bicep. He yelps, and that decides Cat, because moments later, the ANBU flickers to Tenten, grabs her, and hauls her over to Riku.

Then he flashes through hand-seals too quickly for Riku to catch before several tree roots thrust out of the ground around the two chuunin, meeting about a foot above their heads in a dome shape.

Tenten is up against the roots instantly, pulling at them, shouting, “Let us out!”

Riku joins her, trying to wedge his staff in between without any luck. Despite the uneven surface, there’s no place that he can find purchase; the end of his staff catches momentarily, only to then slide away.

Inside the dome, it’s pitch dark. Riku expects to feel the shadows’ claws or teeth at any moment, but it never comes.

“I’ll lead them off,” Cat tells them again, shouting this time; it sounds like he’s on top of the dome. “If they get in, run for the temple.”

There’s a scuffle, and then nothing for a few seconds, before Riku hears scratching at the walls of the dome.

“They can’t get in,” he says blankly.

Tenten doesn’t say anything for a long moment. And then, “We aren’t going to suffocate, are we?”

Riku closes his eyes, breathes in and out carefully. It takes almost no concentration or chakra—certainly no hand seals—to run the simplest diagnostic on himself, to check whether the air he’s breathing is normal or starting to lose oxygen.

Two people in an airtight space this size can last long enough to come up with a solution. Hopefully.

That’s not an issue, though; at least for now, they’re getting enough oxygen.

“I’ll check again in a minute,” Riku says, “but I think we’re good on air. The shadows might be able to get in, though.”

Tenten knocks her shoulder into his chest, jarring a bruise. “ _What_? How can they get in?”

“Didn’t you see how they went flat?” Riku slips down so he’s sitting with his back against the wall. After a few beats, Tenten joins him, her knee bumping his. “If there’s an opening, they can use it.”

Tenten hums in thought. Finally, she says, “We need to not create any light in here, then.” At Riku’s inquisitive noise, she says, “You haven’t gone on missions with Shikamaru, have you? His shadows need light to travel. These are probably similar.”

“So as long as it’s dark in here…”

“We’re safe.” A beat. “Probably.”

It’s a big assumption to make, but then, do they have any other choices? Riku can’t think of any jutsu he knows that might help—if he’d been able to learn Naruto’s Rasengan, he could punch a hole in the wall, but Riku just doesn’t have any all-out destructive jutsu.

Tenten groans and bangs a fist against the wall. (Outside, the shadows sound like they’re attacking that spot, claws and teeth and bodies thrown at it, all to no avail.) “If we had a ninjutsu specialist, we’d be _out_ already.”

“You don’t have anything that could get us out?”

She scoffs. “Don’t you think I’d have used it by now? I have a bunch of exploding tags, if you want to try taking down part of the wall, but they’re pretty punchy.”

“Well, at least we have options.” He could _probably_ heal them—with his unique ability, not jutsu—if it comes to that. He’ll have to do it quickly, though, because the shadows will swarm in right after, and then they’ll need to run.

It’s a last resort. For now, he says, “Let’s give Cat some time to get reinforcements.” No doubt he’ll head _straight_ to Konoha, where they’ll be able to figure out how to get rid of the shadows for good.

“Right. Be ready to move, in case they break through.” And from the shuffling sounds, Tenten must be pulling out one of those exploding tags.

Good idea. If the shadows get in somehow, there might not be enough room for Riku or Tenten to get _out_. They’ll have to make their own escape route, regardless of the risks.

For a second time that morning, Riku grabs at Kairi’s necklace. He closes his eyes and hopes that, if the dome comes down, he and Tenten will be fast enough to reach the temple in time, that Cat will make it to Konoha, that they’ll all come through the morning safe.

(Outside, the storm rages, and the world begins to crumble.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost posted just the Riku scene as a prologue, but this is Kairi's story: she ought to be in the first chapter. So you all get a full chapter 1, and I'm aiming to post the next chapter sometime in the next two weeks.
> 
> This fic is still a WIP; once I go on break (end of next week!!), I'll write ahead, and post chapters approximately once every two weeks, keeping 3-4 chapters ahead of posts. That gives me room to revise and still keep a decent posting schedule. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.
> 
> I hugely appreciate all kudos and comments. ❤ I love getting these stories out of my head and onto a screen where other people can enjoy them, too.


	2. Wonderland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi learns magic, talks to the universe's weirdest cat, and meets Alice, not in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** KH-level violence
> 
> Also, this chapter makes heavy use of headcanons. The magic system in KH is...well, it's there. I have attempted to flesh it out in a way that makes sense with the rest of the structure for How Things Work in this 'verse. And there will be no "*victory trill* You have learned A Thing!" Skills need to be _taught_.
> 
> Also-also, as far as I'm concerned, the KH3 model for gummi ship travel is the One True Way, so I'm writing the gummi segments in this as if they take place in a KH3-style map. 
> 
> At one point in here, the Cheshire Cat quotes the Robert Frost poem "Fire and Ice." (I had perhaps too much fun writing the Cat, especially since those bits were also some of the most frustrating.) 
> 
> And, finally, an apology: I meant to get this up yesterday. Whoops.

There are only three seats in the gummi ship, and four people—five, if you count Jiminy, who introduces himself as the person “chronicling their adventure.” Since he’s a normal-ish-sized cricket, he doesn’t take up a seat; he seems content to stay in Sora or Goofy’s pockets, which are cavernous compared to Kairi’s.

There’s plenty of room for other passengers to sit on the floor, but Donald mutters darkly about “turbulence” and Goofy offers to give up his seat right away.

Sora, over Donald’s squawking, grabs the front-facing seat—the one with handles in front of it, so it must be the captain’s chair. (Why was _Donald_ complaining? Can he even reach the controls?)

“Thanks for the offer,” Kairi tells Goofy, “but I need to practice.”

She _fell off_ the big Heartless. Riku can walk on the ceiling without worrying about it, and Sora’s climbed the tallest trees and cliffs on their play island fearlessly, but Kairi couldn’t get her feet to stick when she really _needed_ them to. She could’ve fastballed the thing’s head over to Sora, if she’d been able to swing at it from its neck.

“If there’s no wind,” Sora asks, “how’s this thing move? Or _is_ there wind between worlds?”

“Don’t be silly,” Donald says. “The ship runs on happy faces!”

Kairi pauses. Sora cranes around the back of his chair to stare at Donald.

With bare seconds to think, Kairi yanks a bracelet off and slingshots it right in Sora’s face, so his “Then how did _y_ —” cuts off with a satisfying yowl.

“Let’s play nice,” she says, while Sora rubs at his cheek and pouts at her.

Donald looks from one to the other suspiciously, but Goofy just pats Kairi’s head and says, “If ya want to practice, I could teach ya how to dodge roll. Think we’ve got enough space.”

That _entirely_ defeats the purpose of staying safe and secure during whatever “turbulence” is, but since it fits with Kairi’s plans, she doesn’t mention that, just smiles at Goofy.

“I wanna learn too!” Sora whines.

Kairi says, “Well, you can’t learn _and_ captain the ship.”

“We can take turns!”

Donald looks less than thrilled, but that seems fair to Kairi.

Goofy is a good teacher; he goes through the same routine Riku always did—he shows her the maneuver, then demonstrates it in half-time before letting her practice in half-time. Once he’s sure she’s got it down, he drills her on it until Sora tries to barrel-roll the ship and Kairi remembers, in Sora’s three-second warning of “We’re gonna roll!” that she was supposed to practice her chakra control.

Goofy grabs the back of a chair with one hand and Kairi’s arm with the other, but when they go upside-down, it’s Kairi who holds him in place, her feet disobeying gravity and anchoring him along with her.

“Well, that’s sure something, a-hyuck.”

Donald is too busy castigating Sora to notice.

“Our friend Riku taught us that!” A pause, as Kairi remembers…everything. “Hey, Goofy? What happens to a world, when the Heartless get it?”

Goofy’s face is unusual enough that it’s hard to read, but the way he shifts and says, “Nothin’ good,” is clear.

“Oh.”

Goofy puts one hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you worry about it. We’ll find the King, and I’m sure he’ll have a plan to help all the worlds.”

Kairi hesitates, then leans forward and hugs Goofy. It’s easy, with her face pressed into his chest, to pretend she isn’t crying. He pats her back and says soothing nonsense, and she pulls herself together before Sora can notice and get all worried.

“Thanks.”

“Aw, you’re welcome. Now, ya wanna practice some more, or d’you wanna try piloting the ship?”

She smiles, turns to the front. “Hey, Sora, move over. It’s my turn to pilot.”

There are handlebars to steer with, and buttons that launch lasers at whatever’s in front of her.

Kairi spends an inordinate amount of time practicing blasting asteroids into tiny little chunks of sparkly bits, which the gummi ship scoops up when she moves it in close enough.

Donald offers criticism and the occasional sour compliment from her right side; somewhere behind her, she hears Goofy stepping Sora through the dodge roll technique. In front of her is a giant spill of stars and floating rocks, and somewhere in all that is a world full of ninja with a broken bridge to nowhere, now, and the only friend Kairi has left in all the worlds outside of this ship.

She isn’t gonna cry. She _isn_ _’t_. But she’s distracted, and that’s when a small purple ship zips in and _shoots at her_.

The gummi ship takes the hit, rocks back and to the side without warning. Sora yelps, crashes into Donald’s seat. Involuntarily, Kairi flinches, eyes squeezed shut and hands white-knuckling the handlebars.

“Shoot them!” Donald screams at her, and Kairi pries her eyes open, but now there isn’t one ship, there’s twenty or thirty or fifty. They’re all zooming around, lasers flashing from a dozen directions, and Kairi jerks the ship to the side into a barrel roll of her own, and then a second when the other ships just redirect their fire.

“ _Shoot_ them!”

“Kairi, you have to—”

“There’s so many—”

The three voices all blend, spiral together into cacophony; in front of her, Kairi can’t even make out the ships anymore, just an indecipherable mass of flashing lights and colors.

She shoves the handlebars forward. Accelerates. The ship crashes forward, hurtling straight through the horde and then away, away, away, all the way to a huge spinning shape that the computer identifies as _Wonderland_.

⁂

“You were doing fine until those other ships showed up,” Sora tries to reassure her.

It doesn’t work. Kairi just looks at him with wet eyes and sniffles.

Goofy looks sympathetic, but it’s Donald who shoos Sora away, who orders him to investigate the door, who faces Goofy and nods his head pointedly in Sora’s direction. Goofy hesitates, but with one last pat to Kairi’s shoulder, he follows Sora over.

“According to King Mickey,” Donald says to Kairi, a complete non-sequitur, “anybody with a keyblade can use magic. So. Pull yours out.”

Kairi blinks at him; his expression turns impatient instantly, and she scrambles to put a hand up and out, calling the key to her with just a thought.

“There!” And Donald pulls out his own wand—or is it a staff for him, since he’s so small himself? It doesn’t look a thing like Riku’s staff, though, which was as tall as him and equally dangerous no matter how he held it. Donald’s wand, on the other hand, is barely dangerous on its own when held upright, let alone upside down.

Donald doesn’t question her giggle at that thought, just narrows his eyes and says, very importantly, “In order to do magic, you have to _feel_ the magic. Thinking about things that make you feel that way helps, too.”

“What way?”

“Whichever way goes best with the spell!” Donald glances around, then points his wand at a sturdy-looking bit of brickwork. “Fire!”

A fireball, just like the ones he launched at the big Heartless in Traverse Town, explodes into the bricks, leaving them singed but unharmed. Sora and Goofy look over, Sora shouting, “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re fine! Mind your own business!” Donald shouts back and waits for Sora to turn back around. (Kairi has to wave at Sora before he does, and even then, she can _see_ the skeptical look he shoots Donald.) More quietly, like he’s worried Sora will try to eavesdrop, Donald says, “Anger’s pretty good for fire spells.”

Kairi blinks at him. “Do you… _have_ to feel that emotion, to do the spell?” Because this sounds an awful lot like how Riku coached them through the healing spell, months ago now. They’d all discovered, after enough practice, that once they got a feel for how the spell itself felt, they didn’t need to rely on memories and emotional associations anymore.

Only they hadn’t called it a spell, they called it a weird jutsu, and Riku admitted he had no idea why it worked that way, since almost no other jutsu or ninja techniques use emotions like. (The only one that does is “killing intent” and Riku could never show it to them because he can’t produce it himself.)

“No, no, it’s just to get started,” Donald says, waving his hand. “ _Master_ magicians like me don’t need that crutch, but a novice like you _does_.”

Kairi’s eyes narrow at his disparaging tone, and she asks before she thinks better of it, “Is there healing magic?”

“Of course!”

“Like this?”

And Kairi holds her free hand out to cast the healing spell over them, even though the worst injuries they’ve got are some bruises.

Donald blinks, looking not at her face but at her hand. Her left, non-dominant hand, not holding the keyblade, which she’d held out to cast the spell.

“You can do magic _without_ the keyblade?!” he squawks. Then, “Goofy! She can cast Cure without the keyblade!”

That gets Sora and Goofy to come over, and Kairi dutifully repeats the spell for them, as soon as she can. Sora blinks at Donald’s continued gaping.

“We both can,” he says with a shrug, putting his hands up behind his head. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“Gawrsh, what d’ya think this means?”

Donald harrumphed. “It _means_ I’ll need to teach you two numbskulls how to do magic _properly_.”

“Why?” Sora and Kairi both ask.

Donald glares at them, feathery hands at his hips. “The King’s old master, Yen Sid, made him apprentice as a magician first. He said it made him a stronger keyblade master, to not have that crutch.”

“Huh.” Sora looks intrigued. “Think we can do that, too? How long will that take?”

“Years,” Donald says, with relish.

Kairi chokes, and she sees Sora jerk back, arms falling to his sides as his whole body says, _no, nope, I_ _’m out_. “We don’t have _years_ ,” she says. “Let’s just use the crutch, okay?”

“No! Not okay! I won’t allow it!”

“Donald, they do have a point…” Goofy looks troubled. “We can’t leave the king waiting for _years_.”

Donald huffs at that, but does eventually back down, moaning, “If only we could see Master Yen Sid…”

Kairi and Sora, meanwhile, heave sighs of relief. Trying to learn chakra was bad enough; it sounds like learning magic properly would be exactly the same as what Riku signed himself up for, and Kairi is _not interested_.

Their grand plan is to scoop Riku out of the ninja world and go adventuring across space. No part of that involves apprenticing for years to learn magic the hard way when there’s a shortcut _right there_.

“You’ll still practice,” Donald says decisively. “Use Fire.” And he points her at the bricks still blackened from his own fireball.

Kairi points her keyblade at the spot, ignoring Donald’s muttered complaints, and thinks about how mad she was the last time she tripped and skinned her knee, losing the race to Sora. Thinks about Riku having nightmares with no one to comfort him. About Sora’s unhappy face when he’s had another fight with his parents.

Remembers how useless she felt in the last major fight. How scared she was when the Heartless ships fired at her, and what came after that fear ran out.

Kairi isn’t the sort of person who holds onto negative emotions like that, but with enough fuel, she eventually creates a fire. As it builds on the tip of her keyblade, other memories wash in, untouched by anger but feeling like _fire_ bright and warm in her mind: the heat of the sun as she lies on the beach, the bonfire celebration of Ifrit’s grace in midsummer, burns on her fingers when she touched the hot stove.

The spell isn’t as strong as Donald’s; the fireball is smaller, wavers in its path, flames out before it touches the bricks.

Nevertheless, Sora cries out in celebration beside her, thumping her on the back the same way he did when she won her first race. He doesn’t have it in him to be a sore loser, to be resentful of her success.

She smiles at him. She lets go of her own resentment at his.

⁂

The Cheshire Cat stares at Kairi. Its fur is the wrong color; its limbs don’t always stay where they ought to. It doesn’t say anything to her specifically at first, but she would swear she can feel its eyes following her, even once the rest of it disappears.

(She thinks she catches them, in her peripheral: there, in the trial, just over the shoulder of one of the card-soldiers; there, in the forest, perched atop a giant flower; there, in the corner of the upside-down room.)

The Cat is the worst part of Wonderland—even worse than the Queen, who is awful but stays in her one little area and just makes trouble from there. Kairi dislikes the Queen, but she doesn’t have the overwhelming urge to get out of the woman’s presence. Not even when she sentences Alice, poor thing, to death.

Obviously, they don’t let _that_ happen; while Sora argues with the Queen, Kairi tries to keep the soldiers off Alice, brandishing her key at them regardless of how many there are or how loudly Donald squawks about _the world order!_

“Oh dear,” Alice says, panic and unshed tears in her voice. “Please, don’t get hurt on my account. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Don’t worry,” Kairi tells her, flashing a grin she learned from her boys, “I won’t get hurt.” It’s a lie, but a well-meant one.

The card-soldiers mostly use lances, which are similar to Riku’s staff in terms of range; Kairi didn’t practice against him much, but the few lessons come back to her as she flickers into close range. Her keyblade doesn’t slice through them, blunt rather than sharp, but solid hits to the middle of their card-bodies send them backwards, knocked off their feet.

There are so _many_ of them, but Kairi can body flicker so _quickly_. Not as quickly as Riku, but enough to dodge a stab, duck underneath and lunge in close, swinging her keyblade into the middle of that one and then spinning to smack a second with the end of her key. She sidesteps the first card, crumpling in slow-motion to her eyes, and jabs at a third, pulls her keyblade back to hit the handle of a fourth’s weapon with enough force that he drops it.

She’s mad enough on Alice’s behalf that she doesn’t even have to call up any memories, just holds her keyblade steady in front of her, aims at the fifth card-soldier she wants to take down.

Light blooms at the end of her keyblade, and a fireball the size of her fist launches at the card-soldier, not only knocking him backwards but also exploding on impact, singing him all down the front. He wails, and his compatriots refocus on Kairi, five more forming up ranks to rush her.

“No!” screams Alice, and Kairi thinks she’s reacting to the scene until she says, “Let me go!”

Two of the card-soldiers got behind Kairi. They haul Alice toward the Queen with no compassion, no gentleness. Kairi ignores the others heading her way and turns, launches herself at Alice’s captors.

“Kairi!” Sora shouts, and joins her, while Goofy slides in behind her to block her pursuers and Donald picks them off from a distance.

Together, Sora and Kairi attack the two holding Alice. They’re stubborn, though, and don’t let go; they try to knock their lances into Sora and Kairi, and when that doesn’t work, one lets go of Alice while the other pulls her in front of him as a human shield.

“Let go of her!” Sora yells at them, while the Queen continues to bellow, “Off with her head!”

Kairi lets Sora fend off the one not holding Alice while she throws herself at the other, keyblade leaving her hands so she can try to yank Alice free.

When she touches Alice—incidentally, her hands brushing Alice’s arms as she pulls at the card-soldier’s grip—a strange light emanates from that spot, accompanied by a soft sort of heat. It isn’t magic, exactly, but it’s not chakra, either. Alice feels it, too; she straightens, says a soft, “Oh.”

Kairi feels like she could cast a dozen Fire spells and body flicker over the length of three islands; she feels refreshed, euphoric. She almost pulls away from the card-soldier, her anger evaporated, but his hands are on Alice and that isn’t _right_.

More card-soldiers stream in. Kairi fights, keeps one hand on the card-soldier and digs her heels into the soft grass, tries to slow his progress to a tiny little cage, ornamental and horrible. When they outnumber her group of friends six to one, though, she admits defeat.

Well. Not until two card-soldiers haul her bodily off their fellow, and she digs her fist into one’s face for the trouble, bites the other one on the side of his card-body until something _rips_ ; he shrieks and lets go of her.

The cards herd her, Sora, Goofy, and Donald away from their Queen and Alice. The Queen stares at them all with obvious hatred, but waves her hand and says, in a tone sniffier than any of Donald’s, “If you ruffians are telling the truth, find me evidence! I don’t care how much! That will decide her fate!”

“I bet she doesn’t care,” Kairi mutters as they are “escorted” to the forest. The card-soldier she bit leans up against one of the hedges, two of his fellows examining his wounds. (Riku would fix him back up. Kairi would bet Riku’s never had to _bite_ anyone in a fight before. But the card-soldier stopped her from rescuing a little girl, so he deserves whatever pain he’s in. Kairi sniffs and turns her head away, fiercely proud of herself.)

The Cheshire Cat reappears, leads them on a scavenger hunt. The whole while, Donald whines that their king clearly isn’t on this world and they might as well leave.

“We can’t leave Alice behind,” Kairi and Sora say.

Donald eyes them. “What about your friend? He isn’t here either. Don’t you want to look for him?”

(He has a point; if not for Alice, Kairi would agree with him. If not for that single moment of warmth, of light, if not for how _scared_ Alice looked and sounded, if not for how terrible it was, to put a child in a cage…

If not for all that, Donald would have a point, and Kairi would be seconding his idea that they should turn around and leave, look for their friends on a different world. One without bizarre cats.)

“Aw, now, Donald, they’re right,” Goofy says, before Kairi or Sora can reply. “That little girl needs our help. I’m sure His Majesty would want us to help her. And we might find a clue about where he is, or where this Riku fellow is, too! That cat sure seems to know a lot more than he’s lettin’ on.”

“Goofy’s right,” Kairi says. “And Riku would _hate_ it if we left someone in Alice’s situation.”

If only Riku had taught them illusions, or something more useful than body flickering. It’s useful by itself, to be sure, but not enough to save Alice.

Then again, maybe if she’d just been quicker…

They find the evidence, _all_ of it, which involves a lot more jumping than Kairi ever thought she’d need to do. Being able to walk up the sides of trees and stick to the edge of a giant, flat leaf with only one hand and her chakra are _immensely_ helpful, and she internally apologizes for not appreciating Riku’s lessons. If she or Sora can get a hand or a foot on it, they can stick themselves there and find a second place to get a grip without worrying about their fingers giving out or their feet slipping.

(Well. Kairi slips a few times, but Sora catches her and hauls her up, and Donald only notices the once. He scolds her vociferously all the same and keeps it up when Kairi’s on the ground and less able to tune him out.)

Donald and Goofy stay on the ground, the former complaining that they’re taking too long, the latter shouting encouragement.

“Hmph. Are we done yet?” Donald taps his foot when they return to ground level, having collected what evidence and little treasures they could from the forest’s treetops. Kairi’s starting to wonder if he’s just having a bad week, or if this is just his _personality_.

“We just have to present this to the Queen and get her to let Alice go,” Sora says. “We’re _almost_ done.”

It isn’t that simple. The Queen doesn’t let Sora (because _Kairi_ isn’t about to stand in that little box and try to be civil to a bully) present all the evidence; she makes him pick one, after shuffling it all around. The glee on her face at Sora’s upset sends Kairi’s adrenaline pumping, a need building in her to just march over to the cage and forcibly unlock it, who cares what Donald will scream about _the world order_.

If she times it right, she could leap up, stick to the cage, and unlock it before enough cards poured in to stop her. Then it would just be a matter of getting Alice to one of those glowing green spots Donald said are like gateways to their gummi ship…

Sora picks the evidence box with a Soldier Heartless in it, and the Queen is appropriately horrified, but it’s not enough, and too late besides: she sets all her soldiers on them, _again_ , and in the melee, something kidnaps Alice.

“You took her!” Kairi screams, frustration and worry bleeding into one another even as Goofy tries gently to lead her away, away, away from where Alice was locked into the tiny gold cage, now empty. “You hid her somewhere!”

The Queen brandishes her scepter at Kairi. “Impudent child! Where’s your proof? I did no such thing! I’ll have your head for such accusations! Guards!”

“ _Kai_ ri, let’s _go_ ,” Sora says, and he grabs at her hand. Unlike Goofy, he isn’t gentle; he tugs her after him as he marches away, and the cards all let them leave, forming up ranks behind them to keep them from coming back, while the queen shouts herself silly about execution or exile or something.

The Cheshire Cat is even more inscrutable the second time they meet him; he leads them around, over Kairi’s protests that they shouldn’t trust him until he starts making sense. (Donald agrees with her, for what that’s worth.)

While the others are busy, Kairi hangs back, tells the others she’s watching to make sure no Heartless sneak up on them. She is watching, really, but she’s also thinking.

First they can’t get to Riku, now Alice goes missing. Nothing she’s doing seems to work. Sora and Donald took out the Guard Armor—at best, she distracted it, and at worst, she kept Goofy from helping the others more. At least they’re evenly matched in magic; hers might even be a little better, but it’s hard to tell, this early in.

They may be matched in magic, but that’s _all_ they’re matched in. If only Kairi’s strength—jutsu—was a little more useful. Body flickering is great, but she could go for setting her keyblade on fire before bashing it into the Heartless.

“Riku says you have to practice if you want to get good at anything,” she mutters to herself, idly kicking a stone. It lands in the dust a few feet away. She sighs. “Alright then. Practice it is. Next Heartless I see is getting grilled.” If she can’t rely on jutsu, she’ll just learn how to cast as well as Donald can.

 _His_ fireballs are twice the size of hers, and he can use more before he has to pause for a bit. She can work on the physical stuff, too—it shouldn’t be hard to catch up to Sora, once they can pause and practice with their keyblades together, so Kairi can see up close what it is he’s doing better than her—but who knows how long it’ll be before that happens? They can’t do that in the _gummi ship_. Magic ought to be faster.

When the Heartless attack, she does burn a few of them. Unlike when Donald casts Fire, hers don’t destroy the Heartless in one or two shots, but the spell softens them up, especially the Soldier Heartless, whose armor makes them harder for Kairi to mow down.

At least taking her frustrations out on the Heartless is successful. She feels better when she’s done: lighter, more clear-headed.

Not light or clear-headed enough to face down a _giant flaming-baton-juggling Heartless_ , though.

The Cheshire Cat warns them about it, then disappears as it strides over to where they are on the table. Goofy carefully jumps down to the ground, while Donald, Sora, and Kairi shoot fireballs at it, trying to find its weak points.

Not the heads, which—really? Not even a flinch for Kairi’s fireball in its faces? Not the legs, either; Donald hits one while Goofy tries to whack its foot with his shield, neither of which fazes the monster. Sora’s wild fireball smacks into one of the batons—like a _circus performer’s_ batons, and the whole pink-purple-yellow color scheme puts Kairi in mind of clowns _and_ gives her a headache—and _lights it on fire_.

“Oh _no_ ,” Sora says, as Donald shouts, “Don’t!” far too late to do any good.

Kairi grits her teeth and braces, keyblade held in a high block to catch a blow from above: the Heartless raises its batons, one on fire, over its head. Swings them down.

Onto the chair.

Flattening it to the ground.

There’s now a picture on the floor where the chair once stood. It doesn’t even splinter, just goes _flat_. Kairi stares, and stares, and stares, and the follow-up swing catches her off guard, knocks her off the table and down to the floor, where she lands on her feet with a wince.

Too slow to use chakra to cushion the fall, but it doesn’t feel like she broke anything, or even really twisted her ankle. Just to be safe, she casts Cure over herself, catching Goofy in the periphery, and then straightens, facing the monster.

“Hit it!” Donald shrills from atop the table, casting an ice spell at it. Sora’s fireballs join him a second later, also from the table. Goofy, meanwhile, casts a worried look over his shoulder at her, even as he bashes his shield into the thing’s foot.

It doesn’t even seem to _notice_.

“Hey, Kairi!” Sora calls. She can’t see him anymore, so she dodges around a swipe from one of its pins and runs up the wall until she can hop over onto a counter. Her footing doesn’t even slip _once_. When she gets there, she sees Sora waving his keyblade toward the Heartless. “I think its weak point is on its chest! Look!” And he casts a fireball, aimed where he said, and the Heartless staggers back.

It hadn’t so much as twitched when she hit its faces, let alone when Goofy clobbered its foot. Kairi’s willing to bet Goofy’s shield is stronger than either of their Fire spells.

“Good job!” Kairi calls back, measures the space between her and the Heartless. All its attention now is on Sora, and it rains down hits on him, to no avail.

Sora isn’t as good with jutsu as she is, but he’s a decent dodger with body flicker. After so many failed attacks, the Heartless seems to give up, lumbering quickly to the far corner of the room.

Kairi stares after it. There’s…nothing over there, that she can see. The brickwork Donald taught her the Fire spell on, but…

Wait. No. That counter isn’t a counter, it’s an oven or—no, it’s a stove top, and the Heartless turns the stove _on_ and uses the burners to _light its batons on fire_.

“Valefor, if you exist, I could _really_ use some wings right now,” Kairi says under her breath. The Heartless comes back, heading right for Sora, while Donald seems to be trying to hurriedly teach him something.

The ice spell, if the fact that Donald casts it at the Heartless means anything. Sora points his keyblade at the giant monster, but nothing comes out. As it looms closer, Sora seems to get frustrated with the whole endeavor, and winds up throwing his keyblade at the single still-flaming baton.

The blow knocks the baton aside—the Heartless doesn’t drop it, and the flame doesn’t go out, but the monster pauses, shakes out its hand as if it aches, and _that_ puts the fire out, like shaking a match.

Meanwhile, Sora’s keyblade has returned to his hand.

Keyblades are _projectile_ weapons. Kairi grins.

While she wasn’t looking, the chair sprang back up. She hops off the counter she was on and dashes over to it, getting herself up with three steps on its leg and then a hand flung up to grip the arm and haul the rest of her up. From there, it’s easy-peasy to jump over to the table and take her place next to Sora.

“That was a _great_ throw,” she says, and Sora does an abbreviated aw-shucks gesture, going pink. “Now I’m gonna try!”

The Heartless returns from the stove, both batons burning, and Kairi doesn’t bother with them. She winds up, weighing her keyblade in her hand as she does. Not as light as the throwing knives Riku slipped her, but not as heavy as a real sword would be. Not even as heavy as Riku’s wood staff.

Riku always had a lot of opinions on the idea of throwing your weapon, which basically amount to “Tenten says that’s stupid and I believe her, but also, she can do it and it looks _awesome_.” Since the reason it’s stupid is that getting rid of your main weapon is almost always stupid, Kairi figures that doesn’t apply to the keyblade.

Because the keyblade _always_ comes back.

So, she winds up and then lets loose, hurling the keyblade to hit the Heartless. It connects, just a little high, and goes spinning before Kairi summons it back to her hand. The Heartless, meanwhile, rocks back, then crosses its two batons and sends a _giant fireball_ at her, Sora, and Donald.

Donald jumps off the table in time. Sora and Kairi, just behind him, don’t quite make it.

“Drop and roll!” Goofy yells at them, and the two kids, their hair and clothes on fire, immediately do. Meanwhile, Donald casts Cure on them.

When Kairi gets up, smoking but no longer burning, she sees Goofy catch a second fireball with his shield. It explodes into sparks and embers, and Goofy cries out.

“Of all the—your shield is _metal_!” Donald screeches at him, then turns to Kairi and says, “Heal him!”

Sora beats her to it; she’s close enough behind him to feel the wash of healing magic, and then she passes him and Goofy, runs straight up the front of the stove, ending in front of the lit burners, and tries to think of how the cold felt, when she and Sora visited Riku.

What emotion would connect to ice? If fire is anger—that makes sense, Kairi always feels hot when she gets angry—then what makes her feel cold? Loneliness? Sadness? “Come on, come on, cold things, freezing, ice, _ice_ …” she mumbles to herself, trying to feel it, sensations and emotions both.

“That isn’t enough, isn’t enough at all,” a familiar voice says. The Cheshire Cat appears, teeth first, leaning against the side of the chimney. “Cold isn’t ice. That’s the worst underestimation of the element since Robert’s. Invite Frost if you want to understand a blizzard. What’s a girl like you know about frost, I wonder?”

“I _could_ know,” she tells it, turning around to see how the others are doing against the Heartless.

Goofy has rallied and, with Donald distracting it, he seems to be setting Sora up for the same jump Kairi used against the big Heartless in Traverse Town. Hopefully Sora’s goes better. She turns back to the Cat.

He grins at her. “Oh my, all the things you _could_ know! But do you? No, you don’t even know what you could know.”

Or it might be, “But do you know you don’t even know what you could know?” It’s hard to tell; his inflection is lilting all over, and his face, smug and evasive. Kairi’s never liked riddles and tongue-twisters, and the Cat must be _made_ of them.

“Can _you_ tell me, then? Since you seem to know.”

The Cat laughs. “I seem to know! Or I know to seem. Have you considered that? What something seems to be can be as important as what it is, especially when no one knows what it is. Are _you_ what you seem, or do you seem what you are? You don’t even know, do you? You could, I suppose.”

Kairi grits her teeth. “Can I take that as a no?”

“You can take whatever you like. I certainly won’t stop you. Others might. Maybe this might help—it’s no vorpal sword, but it will do.”

And then he leaps down, catlike, and rubs up against her legs. Where he brushes into her, though, she doesn’t feel warm fur—she feels tiny spines of frost at first, and then a powerful drag of a slab of ice against her legs. She breaks out in goosebumps and shivers, tries to step back, but the Cat is there, too, butting his head into the backs of her knees, leaving behind the sensation of snow melting down her calves.

(And she remembers: looking at her face in the mirror and wondering, _do I look like my parents?_ Celebrations on the Islands for children, for mothers, for fathers, all barred to her—no one had time for her, her mother too busy organizing the events, her friends all with their own parents. A dim, battered memory of wandering through echoing halls, calling for someone who didn’t answer.

The secret fear that drove her to tell Sora they would go together.)

He was right: the cold she and Sora experienced visiting Konoha is nothing compared to this. She points her free hand at the nearest lit burner and a bloom of ice tickles her palm before it launches, arrowing straight ahead, through the flame and exploding on the brick behind it.

That burner goes out with a sizzle, the ice enough to stop it.

“What’s a girl like you know of frost, I asked,” the Cat says, fading out from behind her and taking up a new position balanced on top of her head. No matter how she shakes or swats at it, it doesn’t move, just jumps out of the way of her flailing and singsongs his next sentence: “I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.” Then he shivers all over and adds, “Do you know enough of hate to call the ice so? It wouldn’t seem to be, but here you are.”

Kairi pauses. It wasn’t _hatred_ she felt when she cast.

The Cat laughs at her. “Don’t look so grim! That won’t help you at all. The darkness has no stake in you, though you are remarkably high stakes for the darkness indeed. But you must feel things; to not feel is to have no heart, and you’ve almost _too_ much of that, haven’t you? So much, you cast with it.” The Cat leans forward, its face upside-down in front of hers, looking serious for once. “Stakes, casting. A roll of the dice. Will you get snake eyes or double sixes? Who can say, until the throw’s cast? That’s chance! And you will only have one chance. We all do, in the end.”

Kairi casts the ice spell at the remaining burner and decides that’s _more_ than enough of that. The Heartless is staggering about now, and if she lets the Cat keep talking her ear off, Sora and the others will finish off a _second_ major Heartless without much involvement from her. Once was enough.

“Thanks for your help, but I’ll be going now,” she tells it, and runs over to the chimney, where she’ll have a better shot at leaping onto the Heartless’s head. She doesn’t _think_ those mouths can maneuver well enough to bite her—and standing on its shoulders would set her up nicely to whack away at its weak point.

“Going, going, gone,” the Cat says, departing from her head one limb at a time, it feels like. “Like poor Alice. More like than you know, but less than they’ll think. Alice’s chance was used already, more’s the pity, and now she’ll be used.”

Kairi almost stops, almost asks _used how_ , but then the Heartless launches these orbs that explode into _multiple_ fireballs, and she’s too busy dodging one and then jumping, reaching out, landing with her feet on the Heartless’s back and her arms flung around its multi-sectioned head. Never mind the Cat’s cryptic nonsense, she needs to focus on the here-and-now.

Those heads can and do bite, but Kairi grits her teeth and yanks one arm free with only minimal bleeding. Her keyblade comes to that hand even though it’s her left, and the sharp teeth dug into her right arm loosen and then let go after she smacks the back of the head five or six times.

Then she uses chakra in her feet and her left hand, now placed carefully on the back of one of the lower head sections, to hang on. She winds up. Swings down. Swings again. Again. Again.

Digs the tip of her keyblade into the spot where the neck meets the armor and casts first a fire spell, then an ice spell. Then a second one of each, after which she can’t cast any more for a bit, so she goes back to hitting.

A few times, it tries to knock her off, but Sora and the others distract it. Once, Sora’s keyblade spins right past her face before it nails the baton about to smash into her head. She calls down a “thanks!” and returns to bashing the thing’s weak point.

It doesn’t take too long—Sora and Donald and Goofy softened it up for her. When finally the Heartless does explode, into sparkles and another huge crystalline heart, it slumps over first, giving Kairi enough warning to jump clear.

“That was exciting,” she says when she’s down, after she and Sora have hugged out their victory.

“That was _amazing_ ,” Sora says. “You went to town on it! And you learned the ice spell Donald was trying to teach me _really_ quick. That was the same one, wasn’t it?” And Sora looks over to Donald for confirmation.

“Yes,” Donald says, eyes narrowed at Kairi. “You learned that in the middle of a fight?”

“The Cheshire Cat taught me,” she says, and then, to Sora, “you probably weren’t thinking of anything cold enough. I wasn’t, at first, because it wasn’t snowing or icy when we saw Konoha.” She’s not even going to mention—anything else the Cat said, about hatred, because it isn’t important.

“Snow and ice, huh…” Sora makes a face, then says, “Hey, if you cast it on something, like—like the plants in the forest, they’ll freeze, right? Think that’ll be enough to give me an idea?”

Donald squawks that _of course_ it won’t, but he’s overruled because Kairi and Sora both want to try and Goofy goes along with them, saying, “Aw, Donald, what can it hurt?”

Before they go, a pointed comment from the Cheshire Cat and a loud yawn from the doorknob make them pause. Sora and Donald lean in to stare into the talking doorknob’s _mouth_ , which just seems unbearably rude to Kairi, right up until a strange light starts emanating from it.

The light traces a keyhole shape in the doorknob’s maw, and Kairi and Sora’s keyblades both jerk up, two bright white lights beaming out from their tips to that keyhole shape.

They hear a click. All the strange lights fade. Kairi and Sora are left swaying on their feet.

“What was _that_?” Donald sounds more confused than belligerent.

Sora’s “Sounded like something closed…” is equally confused.

From the doorknob’s mouth, a bright blue and green gummi piece tumbles to the ground. Kairi steps forward, picking it up.

“This doesn’t _look_ like the others…” She holds it up so the others can see, tilting it this way and that to examine it from all angles. Gummi blocks all look strange—and fit together so seamlessly, which is even stranger—but this one looks…incomplete. “I think it might be a piece of something bigger.”

Donald offers to hold onto it, but he doesn’t have pockets and Kairi does. Better yet, Kairi’s pockets _zip_. Her skort is good for two things: staying out of her way when she kicks things and keeping everything she puts in her pockets safe. (It is _not_ good for keeping her warm, which wasn’t a huge concern on the Islands; if they stumble on a world any cooler than Wonderland, though, she’s going to be in trouble. Maybe they can swing back around to Traverse Town? There must be _some_ place to get clothes—and if there isn’t one currently, there might be an abandoned shop she and Sora can clear the Heartless out of.)

The Cheshire Cat reappears on the table. “Splendid. You’re quite the heroes. If you’re looking for Alice, she’s not here.” His legs start to fade. “She’s gone! Off with the shadows, into darkness.” His torso goes next, followed by his arms. “The jaws the bite, the claws that catch…” His face disappears last, the chin and nose and whiskers leaving just his eyes and wide teeth hanging in midair, and then not even those are left.

Sora’s whole body seems to droop. “No…”

Kairi leans into him. Her own eyes are dry, but there’s a lump in her throat.

“Do ya wanna head back to the ship?” Goofy asks, after giving them more than a minute to take in the news. “Or do ya wanna practice some?”

“We should go back to the gummi ship,” Donald puts in, more somber than Kairi’s heard him. “We might find her in another world.”

That’s…optimistic. Kairi swallows; her eyes burn. As optimistic as hoping to find their friends, with the Heartless roaming everywhere and gobbling people and worlds alike?

Riku can take care of himself. And he has a keyblade of his own. The Heartless may try to eat him up, but they won’t succeed.

“Let’s train,” Sora decides. “So we can be better, the next time.”

Because, for Sora, there will be a next time. Kairi chokes back bile, swallows it down.

They didn’t sign up to save strangers from Heartless. Already, it looks like that’s a losing battle. Even here, where they beat the big one and their keyblades glowed and all that, they lost Alice. How many more times will they lose, how many more _people_ will they lose, if their goal is “save everyone”?

Too many.

The goal is what the goal has always been: stay together.

If Sora wants to save the worlds after they find Riku, if he can convince Riku that’s a good idea, great, Kairi’s onboard. But until then, she has her priorities, and at the top of that list is _her friends’ safety_.

They spend the rest of the afternoon freezing Heartless and the weird Wonderland plants. Eventually, Sora catches on enough to cast his own, super-weak Blizzard, and eventually, Kairi can set aside some of the weirder, more ominous things the Cheshire Cat said.

(What had it meant, saying that Alice would be used? By the shadows, or something else? Does that mean she wasn’t eaten like that man in Traverse Town? That’s certainly how Sora and Donald took that line, running with the idea that they might be able to save her. That there’s still an Alice left to save.

And when it said, “less than they’ll think,” did it mean Sora, Donald, and Goofy, or some other group? Cid and the others in Traverse Town, maybe? But it had been talking about Kairi being like Alice, and the Traverse Town group never met the girl, probably never will now… Kairi puts all these questions aside—maybe she’ll figure out the answers, maybe not, but she’s sure the Cat won’t clear anything up, so it’s all beside the point.)

When Donald starts seriously complaining about wasting their time instead of looking for his King, Kairi seconds his demand to go back to the gummi ship. “Riku’s waiting, too,” she says, in the face of Sora’s disappointment.

Sora grins, mood shifting at the mere thought of finding their friend. “Yeah, you’re right! Okay, let’s go find him!”

⁂

Alice isn’t scared when Maleficent adds her to the growing collection of princesses. Thanks to Sakura’s skill with genjutsu, Alice goes, smiling, humming, eyes half-lidded, straight to her coffin.

Maleficent yells at Sakura for that, after. For the risk. Using jutsu around so much darkness, and for what? So a little girl wouldn’t be scared for less than a minute?

“You must harden your heart,” Maleficent tells her, more calmly, afterward. “Else the Heartless will gouge it out.”

“I understand,” Sakura says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
> Right now, the gameplan is still to get through chapter 4 by end of January. (Though if I can't get through that by the time Re:Mind comes out, I may delay posting.)
> 
> Happy New Year! 🎉🎉


	3. Deep Jungle & ???

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The journey continues! Featuring: A Thing (watch this gummispace), an argument, new points of view, and a handwave at a world that the Disney megacorp couldn't get into the sequels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** Canon-typical violence with Naruto-canon-typical injury/blood, some more keyblade headcanons, non-canonical keychain/keyblade designs

The group beds down on the gummi ship, still hovering over Wonderland because the enemy ships don’t come near the world. Whether it’s indifference or fear, it works in their favor.

(Kairi suggested going back to Traverse Town, but the others outvoted her. Donald was right, it _would_ eat up a lot of time just so they could sleep in sleeping bags under a roof instead of in a ship. That doesn’t mean she’s happy about their decision, but she’ll live with it.)

Kairi wakes last, so she misses the commotion when Sora wakes up with a strange trinket in his hand and discovers that their keyblades can _shapeshift_. She has her own trinket, and by the time she’s up, Sora is brimming with ideas and advice.

“Hold it and think of your keyblade,” he tells her, ignoring the way she blinks at him muzzily, “c’mon, Kairi, I wanna see what yours looks like!”

“Mmrh,” she manages, turning her bleary gaze from Sora’s too-excited face to the little object in her hand. It’s a little cat’s head. Purple. _Familiar_. She narrows her eyes at the wide grin on it, sharp and metallic-bright as it catches the light.

“Kairiiiii.”

She looks at Sora again, sighs, and summons her keyblade. Its hilt replaces the trinket in her hand, and…the key looks different, now.

Gone is the crossguard that reminds her of the Islands, with the sand and waves on either side. Gone are the flowers at the tip, the winding vines around the shaft, the paopu charm at the end.

Now, the key is all over purples and blues, swirling together like bottled mist as she looks at it. It has a basket-shaped guard, with alternating black and white wire that gives it a checkerboard appearance. The back edge is thick and blunt, but the front edge is straight and sharp—not even Riku’s keyblade had a whole sharp edge, but Kairi’s does.

At the top, where the teeth of the key traditionally are, there’s a stylized dragon’s whole head, about the size of Kairi’s spread hand. Its jaws are open wide, but the beast is toothless, and when Kairi carefully runs a single finger along the edges of the dragon, they’re all blunt.

Sora pouts at her. “Why did you get the cool one with a dragon on it, while I got a card-sword?”

Kairi rolls her eyes and makes the key go away; it leaves the trinket in her hand, which she tosses to Sora. “Well, you try it.”

That’s how they discover that, while Kairi can’t use Sora’s original keyblade and Sora can’t use hers, they _can_ use each other’s trinkets. Sora’s little Ace of Hearts gives Kairi a keyblade with a spade for the teeth, light purple through hilt and blade, with a heart on the very top. No sharp edges, but the point of the spade is wicked. Kairi swings it experimentally a few times, then returns it to Sora with a nod and a “Nice!”

⁂

Sora returns her “Nice!” to her less than an hour later.

Piloting the gummi ship goes better the second time around.

Kairi’s still skittish at even the hint of other ships in her periphery, which makes things awkward when she navigates to a new section of space and starts seeing humongous vines hanging from chunks of rock too big to blast apart. There are trees, too, with roots hanging out the bottom and limbs sprawled out all over, draped with leaves and flowers and even more vines, their trunks coated in thick moss.

At least she just sees those. The waterfall, she finds by driving straight into it.

“Ack! What the—” She can’t _see_ , and the noise of all that water cascading onto and then over the gummi ship deafens her and the others. She tries to accelerate and grinds the nose of the ship against whatever rock is in front of her. She tries to reverse, but the pressure from the water behind the ship—the waterfall is _that big_ —keeps her in place until she revs the engine and backs up at inadvisable speed. As she does, she turns just enough to hit the rock behind a _second_ waterfall.

With much shrieking from Donald and scraping against inconvenient rocks, Kairi manages to jerk the ship out of the waterfall without going into a new one. Once they’re free and the water has dripped off the front window, they all cluster together to look.

There aren’t two separate waterfalls; there’s a whole circle of them, with just the opening Kairi steered through, now to the left. There are more trees here, at the tops of the waterfalls, with branches stretching out to make a canopy. They don’t quite look like the other trees Kairi’s flown past, standing taller and straighter. The canopy nearly blankets the space below, letting in only dim, green-filtered light from above.

The view doesn’t command everyone’s attention, lovely though it is. No, the focus of everyone, from Jiminy on the steering controls to Goofy and Sora in back, belongs solely to what floats in the center of the circle of waterfalls.

A gigantic ball of gnarled roots, all tangled together tightly. Blood-red light emanates from the spaces between, pulsing and malevolent, reflecting in the water and turning the bottom spill of the waterfall into something much more gruesome.

When Kairi carefully eases the ship closer, closer, closer, one of the roots lashes out, sends the ship spinning backwards. Everyone cries out. The ship collides into the waterfall again.

(When it strikes, Kairi would swear she can _feel_ its hatred, both an aimless, all-encompassing rage and a more targeted emotion. This thing hates them specifically, hates Kairi and her friends, wants them each and all dead, wants _everything_ dead. It shakes the breath out of her more thoroughly than the collision.

That isn’t an icy hate. It _burns_.)

After Kairi pulls free a second time, she and the others examine the ball of roots from a safer distance.

“I don’t think we can get close to it,” she says finally.

“It looks _evil_ ,” Sora says, face pressed into the glass. “Shouldn’t we…I don’t know, try to shoot it?”

Everyone looks at the controls, where Kairi can squeeze the trigger and fire, then at the strange object. Or is it an entity?

Is there intelligence in it? It certainly _felt_ intelligent enough, to know them, to loath them.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Kairi says, and maneuvers the ship away from the whole affair before Sora can try to argue her into it.

“We can always come back later,” Jiminy tells Sora, his comforting tone mostly disguising how his voice shakes. “If you really want to.”

⁂

Sora finds the next world, after zipping around the trees and vines for what feels like hours.

(Hours Kairi spends glued to the ceiling with chakra, practicing her hand signs so she doesn’t forget them. It’s not quite a nervous tic—she runs through them to calm down, twisting her hands into shapes that require most of her attention to not mess up. It’s more soothing than her mom’s suggestion of counting backwards from ten. It helps settle her, after the strange thing in the waterfall.)

“Hey, everyone, there’s a world!” Sora says, a little too loud for the small space. Edgy. He hadn’t seemed to feel what Kairi did, but she wonders. “The ship says it’s called _Deep Jungle_.”

“Looks like a backwater,” Donald sniffs, while Kairi puts her hands flat on the ceiling and releases her chakra in her feet, swinging from her seated position to hanging upright. From there, it’s a quick, easy drop to the floor, and she stretches her legs out as she comes over to stand on Sora’s other side.

“I agree with Donald,” she says, and Sora’s head snaps up, his mouth falling open, eyes wide before his brows scrunch down in offense. “No, hear me out. Is that the sort of world you think Riku would land on?”

Sora crosses his arms over his chest. “It might be! Maybe he didn’t choose. You don’t know.”

It doesn’t _feel_ like Riku’s on the world, is the thing; neither did Wonderland, and look, Riku hadn’t been there. Kairi doesn’t know if she can trust that feeling, though—isn’t sure it’s anything more substantial than a first impression and assumptions.

She _really_ doesn’t want to hike through a bunch of trees. That could be what she’s feeling.

Beyond that, though, is the thought she had in Wonderland, the one she can’t put to words because Sora will never accept it: they can’t save everyone. Trying will only exhaust them, wear them down, hurt them. Sora’s heartbroken face when the Cheshire Cat told them Alice was gone to the shadows flashes through Kairi’s mind.

Priority number one: stay together. Stay _safe_ together. Running off to every single world seems like a terrific way to _not do that_.

“The King isn’t down there,” Donald says. “Skip this one.”

Sora turns an appalled look on him. “ _Skip_ it? What if there are Heartless down there? They could be in trouble!”

 _Ah_. Sora doesn’t think Riku’s down there, either. But if there are people in trouble…

Kairi lays a hand on his shoulder, squeezing lightly. His attention swings to her, distressed. She sighs.

“Sora, think this through. If Riku’s not down there, _he_ could be in trouble. We can’t waste time on every world. What if he needs us?”

If Sora’s smile is like the sunrise, this expression is cloudy, troubled. His arms stay crossed over his chest. “What if people down _there_ need us? Riku would want us to help them!”

That’s…true. Kairi shuffles, considering her next argument. “Riku wouldn’t want us to put ourselves in danger, though. He’d want us to stay safe.”

“We’re plenty safe. We have the keyblades!”

And they’ve gotten through the last two major fights without significant injury. As far as Kairi’s concerned, that just means they’re due for worse—Riku’s stories almost _always_ end “and then I spent a couple of days in bed” or “in the hospital,” for all that he tries to sugarcoat them. _Especially_ the stories that started off strong.

Kairi can sit on Riku, make him take better care of himself, once she gets her hands on him. She can’t sit on him _and_ Sora, though.

“Which make us _targets_. Come on. If we skip this world, it means we’ll find Riku and the King that much faster. Then the King can help this world! It’s _his_ job.”

Donald grumbles at that but doesn’t dispute it. Sora looks belligerent.

“But _we_ _’re_ here now,” he says. “And Riku _could_ be down there. I’m gonna land.”

“Sora!” Kairi and Donald both say. Only Donald reaches for the controls, though.

What follows is chaos.

⁂

Sora, head throbbing from crashing through a _wooden roof_ , finds himself in a shack. It’s bigger than any shack he’s been in, but there’s no furniture, no real walls to divide up rooms. Just a big, empty, abandoned space, with boxes and barrels all pushed up against the walls, taken over by plants and vines and things.

He considers calling for Goofy, Donald, or Kairi, but he’s still mad at them. Mostly Donald, for crashing the ship rather than letting him land it. And Kairi, for—whatever that was back there.

Before he can, though, something _pounces_ on him.

He pulls his keyblade without a thought, without hesitation. It fits snugly in his hand, a natural extension of his body. The big cat bites the shaft but leaps away when Sora shakes it off.

They circle each other, the cat snarling, before Sora raises his key and shoots fire at it.

So what if his fireballs are smaller and weaker than Kairi’s? He can still cast them. He doesn’t need her Blizzard to beat back this big cat.

(And it makes sense, he supposes, that he’d be worse at magic. He gave up the magic staff, in the weird dream Riku had warned him he would have. It came about a year later than Sora expected, and Riku hadn’t ever remembered what the dream called the three objects, but what he described sounded similar to what Sora had experienced.

Since he’d had a year to think over his choices, Sora hadn’t hesitated. He accepted the sword, cast aside the staff. Riku hadn’t seen a staff, he’d seen a scroll, but Sora had figured that meant jutsu and chakra and all that, which he was already terrible with.

Apparently it meant _actual magic_ , though, which sucks, because fireballs are _way_ more useful than intangible copies.)

The cat rushes at him, trying to bowl him over. Sora dodges to the side, rolls like Goofy taught him, comes up and jabs the keyblade into the cat’s ribs. It yowls and snaps at him, teeth catching on his keyblade again, but it backs off when he yanks the key back. He sweeps the keyblade toward its head and it backs off further, back to circling him, snarling once more.

Sora can feel his heartbeat in his ears. Is that normal? He keeps his eyes on the cat, trying to keep track of its feet and its head at the same time. Where will it go next? How will it attack?

It springs at him, front claws extended. Sora raises his keyblade in a block, his other hand pressed against the teeth of the key for balance and strength and gets pushed back a foot as its weight lands across his keyblade. It slips forward, claws extended for his face, and Sora shoves with his free hand, pulling his other one into his side, pivoting the keyblade and trying to knock the cat off and to the side.

The cat goes down, front paws landing on the floor, but strikes with the rear paws, one hitting Sora’s chest, the other his arm. Sora falls back, crying out as it tears through his shirt and leaves two long, bloody scratches in his arm.

He casts Cure even as he scrambles back to his feet, the cat prowling around him, now panting. Does the smell of blood make cats crazy? Does Sora smell like _prey_?

It rushes him again, this time snapping at his legs; Sora blocks it with his keyblade and lands a blow to its face that sends it back, tries to follow it with a fireball but he’s still out of magic. Kairi and Riku never make that mistake; they count down while they fight or have a better sense of their magic than Sora does.

Well, Riku only knew the one spell. That helped.

Thinking of Riku _isn’t_ helping, though, because Sora’s mind drifts back to where he could be now, and the cat almost takes a chunk of his thigh before Sora manages to flicker out of range last-second. Kairi’s right, of course she’s right, when _isn’t_ she right—except that she’s also wrong.

Riku probably isn’t on this world, but there are other people, and they could need help. Leaving them to fight Heartless and—and big cats like this, it _isn’t_ right. Not when Sora can help.

(His parents are teachers. Surf instructors. As he got older, they drilled into him: it’s his responsibility to make sure the little kids are safe. If they’re littler than him, he needs to look out for them. Alice was littler than him, and he’d failed her. He isn’t about to fail again.)

The cat springs at him again, again, again, and every time, Sora blocks it, knocks it back. He gets a few stabs of his own in along the way, and when he can, shoots some fireballs at it. Those, more than anything, send the creature back, until it lies on the floor with a sad _flump_ , doesn’t get up.

Sora, panting, aching, heartbeat pounding in his temples, inches closer, closer, about to poke the beast with the tip of his keyblade—

Only it wasn’t beat, just faking, and snarls and throws itself at him, too close, _too close_ , and Sora stumbles back, twists his ankle on some of the broken wood littered across the floor, goes down, key up in a desperate attempt to save his life—

And something lands in front of him, grunts at the big cat. The cat snarls again, but doesn’t test this stranger, just takes off, scared enough of the intruder to crash _through_ a broken window.

Sora can’t think of anyone he’s scared of enough he’d leap through a broken window to get away from them. Not even his mom on the warpath. The stranger turns to face him, and it’s a man, barely clothed, with a spear in his hands and tangled, matted hair.

Whoever this guy is, he scared the big cat away. Sora has a good feeling about him—he’s a friend, not a threat.

The man doesn’t talk normally, which is a first; Sora thought the keyblade was supposed to translate? But it isn’t working right—the guy grunts out something that’s _clearly_ a word for whatever location Riku’s at, but Sora can’t understand it.

“Take me there,” Sora begs. “ _Please_.”

Riku will side with him. Riku always wanted to explore new places, even before Kairi came along and expanded their horizons to include _other worlds_. Riku also likes helping people. He was all set to be a _ninja doctor_ before they kicked him out because he wasn’t good enough at stupid ninja magic. Jutsu. Whatever.

Well, joke’s on them, because Riku can be an awesome _space doctor_ , with his keyblade and magic and all that, and he and Sora and Kairi will go around all the worlds and save everyone. They just need to find Riku and it’ll be perfect.

Sora tries again with Tarzan: “I need to see my friend.”

That, at least, resonates. Tarzan looks troubled, but he grunts what sounds like agreement, and gestures for Sora to follow him.

“Hold on, Riku,” he murmurs as he jumps down after Tarzan. “I’m coming for you.”

* * *

Sitting in complete darkness is boring. Even the sounds of the shadow-monsters outside don’t make it less boring.

Gai-sensei warned his team _very_ early on that a lot of ninja work is boring: you wait for intelligence, wait for your lead to materialize, wait for someone to do something… The times it’s exciting are like punctuation points to long, dreary sentences of boredom.

They all have ways of dealing with it. Tenten doesn’t hang out with the rookies enough to know all theirs, but she knows some.

Lee does physical activities, pushups and pull-ups and squats, unless he needs to be sharp and ready-to-move, in which case he meditates, a skill he picked up from Neji. Neji, in turn, usually meditates, but on the occasions he gets antsy (he would _not_ call it that), he runs through traditional Hyuuga _kata_ , often with his eyes closed.

Gai-sensei’s first preference, like Lee’s, is physical exertion. Especially now, though, with his injury, that’s less of an option. More often, now, Tenten finds him playing mental chess, or running through battlefield strategies from the Third Ninja War.

(He always says he’s no match for Nara Shikaku. Tenten has to wonder what kind of tactical god this Nara-san is, if he’s that much better than Gai-sensei, who is fair and objective about how his abilities match up to other people’s.)

Riku would say his own method is equally physical, but it’s not. Or, well, it’s mostly not. Riku _daydreams_ , and while he does it, his hands run through hand-seals, in Academy-perfect order, with Academy-perfect articulation. Outside of perfectionists like Neji, Tenten just doesn’t see clean seals like that, and Riku shapes them at a speed that does his uncle proud.

For all that he only seems to know three jutsu, he can roll them out crisp and perfect every single time. That takes skill. Try telling _him_ that, though, and you just get this blank expression and a shrug.

She wants to _throttle_ him most times it comes up.

So he can’t be a medic. So what? Neither can _she_ , and you don’t see Tenten moping about it.

Riku started out daydreaming—Tenten doesn’t need sight to _know_ he’s flitting through hand-seals—but now he’s just dropped off. Adrenaline crash, coupled with boredom and darkness triggering whatever brain process says, “dark out, sleep time is now.”

Tenten knows from experience—Team Gai met up with Riku halfway through one of his recent courier missions—that Riku drops off like this so he can be up and aware at a moment’s notice. It doesn’t seem like the healthiest thing to Tenten, but then, neither does Lee and Gai-sensei’s ridiculous training regimen.

Once Riku’s out, Tenten figures she’s on first watch, so she keeps herself engaged the way she normally does: she pulls out a bunch of projectiles and throws them at the wall opposite her, trying to create patterns.

The complete darkness is new. A challenge. She grins into it, goes for a Konoha spiral-leaf first, selects a dozen knives for her task and sets to it.

(When she can’t throw herself into a physical activity, her backup is to paint seals; if she has supplies, she just makes ’em, but if she doesn’t, she’ll sketch them in her mind.)

After she throws all twelve of her knives, she gets up and feels around with her hands. Frowns. Four of the knives are out-of-place by her estimation. She pictures them in her mind, based on where her hands tell her they are, and yes: this, and this, and this, and that one too, all off. Not by _much_ , but accuracy is the point here. She pulls them all out of the wood and returns to her spot next to Riku.

The second time, two are off. The third, _half_. She huffs, takes some deep breaths, tries out Neji’s meditation routine. Decides, for the umpteenth time, it doesn’t work for her. Sighs. Tries again.

Only two off this time. Two again. Then, one. Then, zero. She grins.

Next up, she spells out her name, which takes nearly thirty of her shuriken and a solid ten tries to do properly. Tipping a grin at her sleeping companion, she writes out his name next, a good sight neater than he writes it himself, even though it takes her over a dozen tries to pull off.

Tenten grimaces when she realizes what a weakness—a literal blind spot!—she’s just now aware of.

“Now, do I tell Gai-sensei, or not,” she quietly muses to herself, retrieving her shuriken. “On the one hand: he’ll come up with some insane blindfolded training idea, and he and Lee will take it _way_ too far. On the other hand…” She makes a sour face at the wall, now thoroughly pockmarked by her many attempts, most of them unsuccessful. She can _feel_ it, even if she can’t see it. “This is a problem.”

With a sigh, she decides: “Telling him it is.” At least Neji will be charmingly irritated by the whole thing. He’ll try to claim his eyes negate the weakness for him, as if chakra exhaustion isn’t a thing.

She grins to herself. Neji is a bastion of sanity in the face of Gai-sensei and Lee’s complimentary “quirks,” but sometimes, his ego deserves to take a hit. And when she let the others know about this mission, he’d sniffed and said, “I didn’t realize you were still babysitting.”

Tenten doesn’t _care_ what problem Neji has with Riku; implying she’s stupid enough to waste her time deserves a response. Setting Neji up to take the full brunt of a brand-new Gai-sensei training idea seems like the perfect comeuppance.

Even better: Riku will get dragged along, and maybe _this_ time, the fact that he can keep up with Tenten and Lee will sink in.

She’s so caught up planning out how she’ll present the idea to Gai-sensei for maximum dragging-in of Neji, she doesn’t notice Riku glowing right away. It quickly becomes unignorable, though, as bright light floods the space, bright enough to eradicate any shadows.

“Riku, what’re you doing?” She turns to face him; he’s glowing, too much to look directly at, but unresponsive. She tries calling his name, tries shaking him, but still gets no response.

Despite the glowing, touching him seems fine. He’s not even particularly warm. Just…emitting a bright light, steadily, that makes her eyes hurt if she tries to look at him.

She pats around his upper chest, where the light seems strongest, and finds a little bauble on a necklace, round and innocuous. It, too, is safe to touch: a little warm, but that’s it.

Tenten tries slapping Riku (lightly!), tries pinching his cheek and his arm, pulls on his ear, even flicks water into his face, but he is _out_.

That’s…not normal. A ninja on regular assignments doesn’t sleep like that; it’s a liability. They were _just in_ a hostile situation, which is still not resolved!

Under normal circumstances, Tenten would expect Riku to wake up if she _breathed_ too fast. That even repeated attempts aren’t waking him is…bad.

(Just to be sure, she checks his pulse, his breathing. Both are normal. Good.)

Thoroughly spooked, Tenten keeps a knife out in each hand and a careful eye on Riku, even if that eye does water at his current glowiness.

Seven or eight minutes in, Tenten realizes the shadow-monsters aren’t making sounds outside anymore. She doesn’t _relax_ , but she takes the opportunity to raid Riku’s medical supplies.

They’re both littered with scratches, scrapes, bites, and bruises. For such a short fight, they really took a beating, though few of the wounds are serious.

One long scratch on Riku’s bicep, half-covered by his torn sleeve and scabbed over now, makes her reach for the rubbing alcohol and bandages. It looks big enough to need stitches, but she isn’t the medic. Bandages will have to do until Riku can wake up and deal with it himself.

While she treats Riku, Tenten’s increasingly aware of a bite on her left arm. She vaguely remembers one of the shadows chomping down. She might’ve punched it off? Anyway, the teeth-marks have also scabbed, and they sting fiercely when she attacks them with the alcohol.

She hisses through her teeth but takes it. She’s had worse. Wrapping the bite is awkward, since it’s right on her elbow, but she gets the job done. Despite its location, the bite doesn’t seem to have compromised the joint—provided she keeps the wound from infection, she should be fine.

Riku, when he wakes, will be able to tell her more. Tenten pokes and prods him, but he doesn’t stir.

Sixteen minutes after she last tries to wake Riku up, maybe twenty-eight after the light first started glowing, it snuffs out. From total brightness back to total darkness in a moment, and Tenten sees stygian colors in the aftermath.

Riku still won’t wake. His necklace is no longer more than body-warm to the touch.

Tenten sighs and settles in to wait, pulling out her knives for another round of blind target practice.

⁂

Voices pull Tenten out of a light drowse. (Riku doesn’t stir.) They’re loud, accompanied by knocks against the side of the dome.

Voices imply they aren’t shadow creatures, but as Tenten squints and concentrates, she can’t figure out what they’re saying. Code? A foreign language?

(Another quick glance to where Riku lays—part of her briefing included the fact that his Islands have a different language. Have they somehow managed to get there? Or have Islanders found them?)

Tenten tries calling out, “Hello? Who’s out there?”

The voices pause. When one returns, it’s clear and loud, from behind her head. She still doesn’t understand it, but it sounds inquisitive.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Tenten calls back when the voice pauses, “but I’m kind of stuck in here.”

Another pause, another unintelligible sentence with an inquisitive tone.

Tenten gives up.

⁂

Riku wakes up in fits and starts. If Tenten woke up like that, Gai-sensei would put her on a night-ambush-training-routine _so fast_.

Something weird is going on, though, so she’ll let this one slide. No need to mention it to Gai-sensei unless Riku does something to irritate her.

(Very, _very_ possible: Riku _thinks_ he’s getting away with hiding his injuries, but only because Tenten doesn’t have definitive _proof_. As soon as she does, she’s going to take it to whoever is most likely to not go easy on him—which means _not_ Gai-sensei, who goes all soppy whenever he looks at Riku, in a way at once startlingly similar to and noticeably different from how he used to look at Lee.

There’s no question that Lee’s still Gai-sensei’s favorite, but Tenten suspects Riku is something like a step-favorite. A step-nephew, if you will.

She was _going_ to go to Riku’s uncle, but Tenten’s briefing included the fact that Riku has a dedicated ANBU bodyguard, and now that she’s seen Cat in action, he might be the better choice. If— _if_.)

“Glad to see you’re finally awake,” she tells Riku, when he’s awake enough to kick her. (She kicks him _back_ , and he’s still groggy enough not to dodge.) “Maybe you can talk to the people out there.”

“Wha? What people?”

She hears him shuffle onto his knees, feels him sway when his shoulder knocks into hers, catches him. She could have lit a match, but that seemed like asking for trouble when surrounded by dry, flammable wood, with unknown elements outside. Better alive and blind than burned to death. “I don’t know, people. They’re outside, it’s not like I can see them. I can’t even understand them.” Then she raises her voice, shouts out, “Hey, whoever’s out there, my friend is awake now! Maybe he can translate what you’re saying!”

She feels him flinch, rubs her thumbs in soothing little circles on his shoulders until he relaxes. So _now_ he’s high-strung, huh?

The voices call back, and with her hands on him, she feels Riku tense up.

“I can understand them,” Riku mutters. “They’re talking about magic.”

 _Magic_? “You sure they said magic, not jutsu?” she asks, even though that’s not the kind of mistake Riku would make.

“Really sure.” He hesitates. “What do you think happened to those monsters?”

Tenten shrugs, realizes he can’t see her, sighs. “Maybe they wandered off.”

Maybe the bright light chased them off. She isn’t about to get into that, though—it can wait until they’ve established whether they’re still in hostile territory. If it seems relevant, she’ll bring it up then.

Riku makes a noncommittal noise, obviously as doubtful of that idea as she is. Then he sucks in a breath and calls out, “Can anyone out there hear me?”

Tenten jerks back from him; when he chuckles at her, she lets go of his shoulders and socks him in one, lightly. He either doesn’t see the hit in time to dodge or decides it’s fair and takes it.

The voice from before comes back, from behind Tenten’s head again.

She can’t understand, but Riku clearly does, waiting for the voice to finish before he says, “Yeah, she’s here.” Then he nudges Tenten, his knee practically digging into her thigh with how close they’re still kneeling to one another. “Say hi.”

“I’m here!” Tenten calls, nudging him back. “Ask them if they can get us out.”

Riku scoffs. “You haven’t figured a way out yet?”

Tenten leans forward, pokes him in the ribs, right where she knows he’s ticklish. Riku jolts away from her, but obligingly calls, “Do you think you can get us out? We’re kind of trapped.”

As they both listen to the response—Riku (hopefully) carefully, Tenten mostly tuning out from incomprehension—Tenten considers.

Riku isn’t _translating_ , per se. That involves hearing something in one language, and then saying the same thing (more or less) in a different language. Riku is just…listening to this other language, and responding in the one Tenten speaks, but the voices _also_ understand him when they didn’t understand her.

Her eyes narrow. If she built a seal to do something like that, what would it need? It would have to be multi-segmented: a comprehension piece, a receiver, output—and the output is the most important part. Maybe genjutsu-based, playing on the receiver’s mind, so meaning transmits to the brain directly regardless of what they hear?

Genjutsu isn’t her forte, but that sounds wickedly complicated. She’d need at _least_ eight points to hold that much chakra, and probably double that number for enough points of articulation for a task so complicated…

Plus, she’d need a medical expert on the brain to explain how language is stored, and _then_ a genjutsu expert to tell her how genjutsu might be used to target those brain functions specifically, and then she’d need to take all those notes and figure out how to draw up a seal to mimic the process on command…

Honestly, she’d probably need two seals, one for input (so the sealed person would _understand_ anything said to them) and one for output (so they could _be understood_ ), and either one would probably need a good deal of space. It isn’t the sort of seal you’d want to paint on someone, either—too messy, and any stray line, any bump or slightly-wrong curve could damage the process. Considering the seal would have to work with _both_ the sealed person’s brain _and_ the brain of whoever they were targeting, that’s two too many brains to potentially fry with a single mistake!

So, tattoo it on, and then what, hope the chakra cost of running a genjutsu that complicated—potentially _two simultaneous or consecutive_ genjutsu that complicated—doesn’t kill the recipient? Chakra cost alone would make it nigh unusable for most ninja. Someone diplomat-track with chakra to spare might be interested, though…

Tenten’s pulled out of her musings by a sudden, overwhelming, grating buzz. It turns high and sharp after a breath, and after two more, Tenten looks at where it comes from and sees _something_ cut through the roots across from her and Riku.

The _something_ is metal, louder after it gets through; sparks fly into the dome, and a thin line of light trails behind it as the object pulls down, then to the side, then juts upward once more in a vaguely oblong shape. Finally, it drags back to the original point, and then the object retreats and the sound disappears.

In the silence, Tenten’s ears ring.

She has questions—too many questions—but nothing was ever solved by sitting and waiting for answers to come to her. She springs up and marches to the cut-out piece of wood, a knife in each hand, and kicks it until it falls with a _thud_.

Mistake: she’s blinded by the light. Gai-sensei would scold her. _Actions have consequences_ , and she’s chuunin now. She knows better. She retreats a step back into the shadow of the dome, knives up defensively as she blinks to acclimate.

Riku joins her shortly, shoulder bumping hers, staff out in a defensive posture. She keeps hers eyes low, examines his form: good footing, strong grip. He’s ready to transition to swords—he’s been ready, really, for a few weeks, but Gai-sensei said to use an abundance of caution with Riku.

Swords have sharp edges and points, for all that Tenten would never start a beginner with live steel. Certainly not _Riku_ , at least not until she’s caught him self-healing something stupid and ratted him out to someone who will sit on him appropriately.

She can _just_ see him trying to reattach a finger or something, all on his own because he’s stupid and reckless. Ugh. _Not on her watch_.

Anyway.

Riku’s stance is good, and Tenten faces down whoever their would-be rescuers are with about as much confidence as she can expect without the rest of her team behind her. If Riku’s nervous, he doesn’t show it.

After her eyes adjust, Tenten examines what she can see. The light is at an unfortunate angle, but it looks like gardens? A lot of green, anyway, in shapes that ping as unnatural without her brain being able to process what they _are_. Two people, small-ish, indistinct.

Tenten steps out, keeps her breathing even, her eyes flicking over everything as her view expands.

The gardens are landscaped, whimsical, with hedges trimmed into precise shapes, columns and platforms and arches, castles and figures.

The dome is planted right in the biggest one, denting the side of an elaborate topiary castle like it was launched in some kind of garden siege. Next to the bright green of the grass and hedges, Cat’s plain wooden dome looks out-of-place, dull and drab.

Tenten takes it all in, then focuses on the figures. Waist-height animals—summons? But most summons don’t wear clothes. (Some do, though!) These are positively humanized, with big eyes and hands with _fingers_.

One is a mouse, the other a duck. Tenten’s never heard of summoning contracts for either species. In the back of her mind, the little Tenten that desperately wants to make a name for herself anyway, anyhow, sits up and takes notice.

The mouse-lady speaks, gesturing to herself, then her companion. Tenten elbows Riku, but he’s prompt enough about translating:

“I’m Chuunin Riku, and this is Chuunin Tenten,” and then for her benefit, “Tenten, this is Queen Minnie and Duchess Daisy.”

“Those are titles, aren’t they?” Not ones she’s heard, but Riku isn’t obnoxious enough to introduce himself by rank unless he has a reason. Rank and _not_ clan title.

“Mmhm,” Riku hums, and then leans into her and says under his breath, “The queen’s like a _daimyo_ ’s wife. Duchess is…high nobility, I think. They _should_ have guards.”

But they don’t. So, either they don’t need them, or they _think_ they don’t need them.

“Got it.”

Riku straightens. That wasn’t very subtle, but Minnie-sama and Daisy-san don’t seem to mind.

Something in a questioning tone from Minnie-sama, and Riku responds with, “Yeah, we’re fine.” A quick glance at her, assessing. “Right?”

A sharp remark from Daisy-san and Riku’s face goes flat, his eyes flicking over them both and lingering on points of injury.

Tenten gets why he dismissed their cuts and bruises: they don’t have any hurts that would jeopardize a mission. But some of the scratches sting and itch.

“You got the medic training,” she says with a shrug, rather than _I would like a physical and a bath in that order, please and thank you_. “Think anything’s gonna get infected?”

“Probably not.” For all his cavalier tone, Riku’s brows draw tight together, and Tenten _knows_ that he’s gonna examine them both as soon as they get even an inch of privacy. What he says to the two in front of them, though, is, “Where are we?”

This leads to a back-and-forth, and while they talk, Tenten thinks over what she knows about summoning scrolls. Gai-sensei let her look at his once, but he was _incredibly_ touchy about the affair. He would’ve let her sign if she’d been interested, but she isn’t.

Wasn’t. She’ll rethink her position, if a _brand-new_ summoning contract on offer. (The _Sannin_ signed brand-new summoning contracts. Contracts no ninja had signed before. Contracts that didn’t _exist_ before them, basically.

Those are big footsteps to follow, but Tenten wants nothing more.)

She’s jostled out of her musings by Riku’s elbow. “C’mon, she’s taking us to medical,” he says, nodding to Daisy-san, who seems to be waiting for them. “What were you thinking about so hard, anyway?”

She grins at him. “Fuuinjutsu,” she says, and Riku groans, because he’s a baby who hates to do his homework.

The walk to what passes for a medical—wing? Room? Clinic?—passes in silence. Riku’s face flickers through worry and frustration, fists clenching and unclenching at his side, while Tenten surveys their surroundings constantly.

This could be a trap. She doesn’t know how they got to this place from the forest near the Fire Temple; she’s never seen architecture like this, all soaring ceilings and huge windows. Natural light spills _everywhere_.

If it came to a fight, she and Riku would need to go up. It’s a straight shot—some of the walls have portraits or tapestries, but some are unadorned for long stretches, making a vertical run the easiest thing. The duck takes them down four separate hallways, each long, airy, and straight, with a handful of window-seats here and there to provide scant cover.

In a fight, that wouldn’t be enough. Tenten and Riku could pick off pursuers or long-range attacks on their way to some of those big, wide windows, bust out, and take off from there.

Who knows what kind of defenses the outside holds, though?

“Medical” turns out to a be a wide, spacious hall, with a dozen beds lining either wall, each with privacy curtains that can be pulled shut. In between and at the near and far ends of the room, there are cabinets, wide and tall, with the kinds of bottles and other medical supplies that Tenten mostly gave up learning about when she realized her chakra control was just _not good enough_.

Only two of the beds are occupied. One patient seems to sleep; the other sits up in her bed, facing a large badger-man in monk’s robes who offers her a glass of what.

Badgers don’t have a summoning contract, either, as far as Tenten knows.

Daisy-san ushers them onto a bed and then drags over a stepstool, using it to stand taller and examine first Tenten, then Riku. She looks displeased but not worried about their assorted injuries, with the exceptions of the ones Tenten was concerned about, too.

Riku looks downright affronted by the latter, leaning over to examine it himself.

“When did you get _bit_?” he asks, and then, to Daisy-san, “Do shadow-monsters carry rabies?”

“They weren’t _frothing at the mouth_ ,” Tenten mutters. She knows better than to let herself get bit by something obviously rabid.

The hard glare Riku turns on her says he isn’t impressed with that response, but before he can address it, Daisy-san answers his question.

Riku makes a face and describes the shadows for the ducks, sketching out approximate sizes with his hands. He _could_ use a genjutsu to just show her, but Tenten doesn’t blame him for not: the more tricks up their sleeves they can keep, the better.

Daisy-san says something, and Riku details the attack, leaving out all mention of Cat. Good thinking there, too; being a courier finally drilled some discretion into him.

Then Daisy-san talks for a _while_ , and the badger-man comes over to smile at them and listen.

“Uh,” Riku says, when she finishes. “Can we…have a minute?”

Looking distinctly unimpressed, Daisy-san gets down from her stepstool and pulls the badger-man aside. Riku looks a little shocky, so Tenten drags him all the way onto the bed and pulls the curtains closed around them.

“What is it?”

He turns wide, horrified eyes on her, and says, “The shadows are called Heartless, and they…destroy worlds.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news: I have up through chapter 5 written, and I am _super excited_ for what goes down in chapter 5.  
> Bad news: I'm going back to work, so my writing is very likely gonna slow down, at least until I get back into the swing of things.
> 
> I do still expect to post chapter 4 before the end of the month--whenever I finish chapter 6, since I'm trying to keep a buffer. If I can swing it, I'd like to post chapter 4 before the DLC drops; otherwise, expect it by the end of the month.


	4. Disney Castle & Deep Jungle, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Riku and Tenten find out about the keyblade and its capabilities. Riku doesn't take it well, and then he REALLY doesn't take it well. Meanwhile, Kairi and Sora sort out themselves and the Deep Jungle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** references to suicidal ideation and a canonical suicide; description of an averted panic attack/lead-up to a panic attack; negative self-talk/skewed thinking, including some re: low self-worth; mentions of blood, death, and some gore (not to any characters). There is hurt/comfort here, but it's heavy on the hurt and light on the comfort.
> 
> This chapter deals with trauma/PTSD, and some of what the characters do is good, but keep in mind no one here is a trained therapist.
> 
> I'm posting this now in part because I've written out to chapter 6, so I've got my buffer, and in part because I wanted to get it done and posted before the DLC drops. :D Hopefully that will be like a nice, exciting chaser for all the angst in this chapter.

Tenten really wishes there was a required Academy unit on trauma.

There were _lessons_ , of course; and, _of course_ , jounin-sensei were expected to fill in the details as their genin students matured and could handle nuance.

The lessons probably have bare titles, like _First Casualty_ , or _First Encounter with Killing Intent_. Gai-sensei delivered a lot of them, his normal exuberance reined sharply in.

Tenten’s been on a team of heavy hitters since she was twelve; she specializes in weapons, but the boys are hand-to-hand specialists. When they face death on missions, it isn’t at range, where it can be quantified and explained away.

Death is, for Tenten, visceral, in the truest meaning of the word. Death involves _viscera_. The hot, coppery splash of blood, a splattered arc on the ground or the wall or her arm. The grind of metal into bone. The ugly browns and reds that human insides always resolve into.

She helped Riku with some of his medical studying, because close-range fighters need to be just as aware of human anatomy as medics.

She, Lee, and Neji all saw death before their Chuunin Exams. (Neji delivered it, and some tiny part of her remains convinced that his cold adherence to the idea of fate was an especially ill-advised coping mechanism.)

Gai-sensei treated the subject, whenever it came up, with care and gravitas he didn’t usually deploy. He helped his students find their own ways of coping with what they had seen, what they had done. He made himself available to them; they know where he lives, have a standing invitation to see him whenever they want, no reason or advance notice necessary.

Why he didn’t do the same for Riku, Tenten isn’t sure. Maybe he assumed Kakashi had?

Well. Kakashi didn’t, and Gai-sensei didn’t. No one did.

Tenten takes a deep breath. Compartmentalizes, the way ninja are _supposed_ to, are _trained_ to. Stands up, puts her hands on Riku’s shoulders to stop his pacing.

He stares at her, mouth working soundlessly. Eyes glassy. Fingers, hands, arms twitchy.

“I’m going to ask you some questions,” she says, in an even, slow, soft voice. Calm, calm, she _must_ project calm right now. “Is that okay?”

Riku flinches a little, like the question is an attack. Tenten doesn’t let herself frown. He rallies after a pause, swallows, and nods.

While she waits for him to meet her eyes, she weighs whether to suggest sitting down. It might help calm him, or he might spin out further, feel more under threat.

(Her training was more how to deal with civilians than how to deal with ninja—Gai-sensei assumed any ninja they encountered going through something traumatic would have the same training they did. But Riku’s always been something strange, more civilian than _shinobi_ in some ways.)

A civilian, she would ask to sit down. A medic, too, probably. A courier? Not a chance, couriers are used to staying on their feet, ready to bolt in an instant. If Riku has a hair-trigger—and Tenten has the unpleasant suspicion that he does—it’ll be set to _flight_ , not fight.

She goes with _most recent training_ and doesn’t say anything about sitting.

“Okay,” Riku says when he looks up.

She smiles and nods. The expression isn’t fake—Riku’s not _stellar_ at picking up on deception, but all it takes is one wrong move and she doesn’t even want to _think_ what a complete PTSD meltdown would like look on _Hatake Kakashi_ _’s nephew_ , her protege, with a medic-nin’s chakra control and a courier’s speed and as much martial knowledge as Gai-sensei could drill into him over the last year.

Not pretty.

Given his inclinations, the worst will come to anything or anyone that gets between him and escape; Riku isn’t, by nature, violent or aggressive, but it’s easy to justify violence to yourself when you feel under threat, and Riku is capable of a _lot_.

So her smile is genuine and she keeps her tone calm when she says, “Good. Can you show me the Monkey seal, please?”

He does. She takes him through all the seals, makes her breathing loud and steady and watches him to see when he starts mirroring her. It takes until the Tiger seal.

“Great. Thank you. Now, do you think you can tell me about those shadows? It’s okay to say no.”

Riku will never in a million years say no. She watches his face stiffen, feels the tension return to his shoulders. He nods, face tipped so his bangs fall heavily across his _hitai-ate_ , long enough to shade his eyes.

She’s _never_ seen Riku do that. Where’d he even pick that up? The boys he knows don’t have long enough hair, so it must’ve been a girl.

…Ah, of course. Hinata is growing hers out now, isn’t she?

“They’re called Heartless,” he says tonelessly, shoulders hitching further up toward his ears with every word. Tenten resists the urge to push down; she keeps her hands right where they are. (Weight, human contact.) “The ones we saw are…natural?” His nose wrinkles, like he isn’t sure. Daisy-san did speak rather quickly. He might’ve just not caught the whole explanation. “And when they attack people, they make more of themselves?”

Tenten pauses. If Riku were even a little more put-together, she’d let out the incredulous flash of _like zombies?_ As is, though, she buttons it up behind her lips. She needs to model calm for him; he’s responding, but he’s not done spiraling yet.

It’s _really_ unfair of Gai-sensei and Hatake Kakashi and even Riku’s medical instructor and Yuuhi-san and his courier instructor to have _all_ neglected this aspect of Riku’s training. Did everyone just think he would _never_ encounter death face-to-face?

He’d been training as a _medic-nin_! He’d done his Chuunin Exams _in the Bloody Mist_!

Tenten’s a chuunin now. She can apply to have _everyone_ demerited for leaving this up to her. Whether Tsunade will sign off on it is another question, but right now, the dull rage and resentment simmering behind Tenten’s ribs demand she do _something_.

“Is that all?” she asks, instead of letting slip _any_ of her other thoughts. Calm. She needs to be calm.

Riku shakes his head. He really does need a haircut, if just so he can’t hide his face when she needs to see it.

He takes a deep breath, unprompted. “No, she also said they can destroy worlds.” The words spill out of him in a rush, all directed at their dirty feet. “If they find the heart of a world, they can eat it, like they do people, and that destroys the world. Somehow. She said that’s how people wind up on other worlds, because their own is destroyed.”

And Tenten can’t even excuse herself to scream into a pillow about _that_ , because Riku will have a nervous breakdown while she’s busy, and—she doesn’t even know what he’ll do.

Suicidal impulses can run in families.

Gai-sensei never told her or her teammates what happened to Hatake Sakumo. Tenten looked it up, when Gai-sensei was in the hospital and she was deciding whether she wanted to take over Riku’s training. At the time, she’d just been poking around for anything like a family style or a preferred weapon, something his uncle might have packed away that she could train Riku toward. What she’d found…

Yeah, she isn’t about to leave Riku alone right now.

Regardless of what’s happened to Gai-sensei (to Lee, to Neji, to _the village_ —), Tenten tries her best to make him proud.

“If they know that,” she says, “then it must have happened to other worlds. What are they doing to help it, or to stop it? Did Daisy-san say?”

She feels Riku lock up, sees confusion splashed over his face when he meets her gaze. She can’t dredge up a smile—if he realizes it’s fake, she could lose him—but she tries to look curious, nonjudgmental.

“She didn’t,” Riku says, slowly. “She didn’t say if they were doing anything for other survivors, either.”

Excellent deduction, and of course a former medic would think first of how to help others. That may be the best way forward: a productive use of Riku’s skills, a task or a series of tasks to focus on, with tangible benefits to others. Rewarding. Meaningful.

Tenten might get her own chance to fall apart sooner rather than later.

“Do you think you’re up to talking to Minnie-sama? We could ask about that.”

Riku pauses, and Tenten gives a mental cheer. He’s not better yet, but he’s thinking, self-assessing. Her gaze flicks down—his hands are shoved into his pockets, but they don’t seem to be twitching anymore.

“Let’s do that,” he says, and when he looks up, his smile is wooden. “It’s better than standing around here, isn’t it?”

Maybe, maybe not. But it probably can’t be _worse_ than standing around, so Tenten squeezes his shoulders and drops her hands. “It could be. Let’s find out.”

⁂

Clayton is even worse than Kairi’s mom. He stumbles on her when she’s walking in circles, and his eyes almost bug out of his head.

“I’m lost,” she tells him, crossing her arms over her chest defensively, expecting ridicule. His mouth gapes open, but no criticism falls out, so she goes on: “Do you think you can help me find my friends?”

“Oh, yes, certainly!” he says. “Please, let me escort you to my camp. I’m _sure_ we’ll be able to find your friends from there.”

He’s right, because Donald and Goofy are waiting for them in camp, but also wrong, because Sora’s still missing.

And the way he _introduces_ Kairi to the woman running the camp!

“I found this poor waif wandering in the jungle,” he says, casting a suspicious look at Donald and Goofy. Donald gives him a narrow-eyed glare right back. “I’m not sure what designs these men have on such a creature, but we _cannot_ simply leave her here. We’ll take her back to England when we return.”

The woman, Jane, plants her hands on her hips. “And did you _ask_ if she wants to go to England?” She turns to Kairi. “Do you, dear? Do you even speak English?”

“Yes,” Kairi says, unfamiliar with the name of the language but sure she can speak it, “and no, I want to stay with my friends.”

Ever since, Jane has rebuffed all Clayton’s attempts to make plans to bring Kairi to “England,” and Clayton refuses to leave Kairi alone in a tent with Donald and Goofy. He only leaves after securing Jane’s exasperated word that she’ll stay with Kairi and not allow “anything untoward” to occur.

“Honestly, that man,” Jane says, but she rather quickly sends Goofy and then Donald off on pretexts. When they’re alone, she asks Kairi, “Are you sure those men are your friends? They haven’t done anything to make you uncomfortable, have they?”

“No.”

“Alright. Let me know if that changes, alright?” And Jane smiles and tucks some of Kairi’s hair behind her ears. “It’s important, so far from anybody else, to look after one another.”

Kairi nods to that, feeling it resonate in her chest. That’s _exactly_ what she’d tried to tell Sora—that they have to look after one another, that they can’t afford _not_ to.

(Still, she can admit—to herself, not to Sora—that she doesn’t want anything to happen to Jane. The woman is kind, and she explains her research to Kairi like she’s talking to an adult, not a child.

If the Heartless attack the camp, Kairi will fight them off before she lets them take Jane the same way they took Alice.)

⁂

Minnie-sama and Daisy-san settle down in a room that might have once been a library, before it sampled some of the Poison Squad’s more recreational experimental fungi.

The table was brought in just for them; Tenten spots the scuffmarks on the doorjamb, too high for either of the women to have reached. There are chairs, too, four of them, in four different styles.

Tenten’s sports a cutout in the back big enough for, oh, say, a human-sized cat-person’s tail. While Minnie-sama and Daisy-san say a whole lot of incomprehensible words in Very Concerned Tones with Very Concerned Faces, Tenten fingers the gap and decides it could probably fit a dog’s tail, too, unless the dog got excited and its tail thumped. That would probably be painful.

Riku’s chair is backless, and he has his legs crossed on it, one hand wrapped around an ankle, knuckles white.

Tenten has some fingerless gloves that will fit him, if he didn’t pack his own. He might’ve just decided not to wear them when they set out for his Islands, what feels like weeks ago. (It was only, what, yesterday?)

When the ladies pause—for breath more than a response, based on how they’ve been going—Tenten says, loud enough to cut across any additional comments they may have, “Can you tell me what they’re saying? It seems important.”

All eyes focus on her, and Riku shifts in his seat, like a sunflower seeking light, or a drowning man reaching for rope. More the second, given those white knuckles. “They said there’s something that can stop the Heartless. A weapon.”

Tenten blinks. A _weapon_? That’s good news. “What kind of weapon?” she asks, leaning forward, aggressively focused on Riku and only Riku.

When she’s watching, she can see how his mouth doesn’t quite match what he’s saying, even though her mind insists it does. So, whatever does his translating for him doesn’t just affect _him_ —and she wonders how many others in Konoha have realized that before she remembers what happened to Konoha and has to swallow and refocus.

“A magic weapon,” he says, eyes darting to the women briefly before returning to her. He shifts again, turning further toward Tenten. “It can destroy the Heartless and return their hearts, bringing people back. And it can make worlds safe from being eaten by Heartless.”

Well, _that_ sounds useful. Tenten considers three different questions, goes for the most important. “It brings people back? They aren’t dead after the Heartless get them?”

Cat led the Heartless off. Either he made it to Konoha, or he didn’t. Either way, _Konoha_ didn’t make it.

Riku shakes his head. “Sort of?” He looks to Minnie-sama and Daisy-san. “Do people die when the Heartless attack them?”

Daisy-san shrugs. Minnie-sama shakes her head, says something brief. Riku turns back to Tenten.

“They aren’t really _dead_ , but they’re gone. Their Heartless is the darkness in their hearts, so when the weapon destroys it, the heart can come back.”

_Can_ does not mean _will_ , Tenten notes. But Riku looks less shaky, his grip relaxing as he warms to the idea, so she leaves that alone and asks instead, “Do they have one of these weapons?”

He shakes his head and she sighs. So much for _that_ idea. Why they spent so long talking about something they don’t even have, she doesn’t know. Was it to give them hope, or to cruelly dangle that hope in front of them, only to yank it away?

They _look_ nice, but that means nothing. Tenten discreetly surveys the room: windowless, one point of entry leading to a high-ceilinged hall. The table is about big enough to distract and delay the two women if Tenten shoves it with force at them—that could give her enough time to drag Riku out of the room and up, out through one of the many windows.

They still have all their gear, packs no longer on their backs but next to their feet. Tenten’s most valuable weapons and necessities are in the packs on her, except for food, which _will_ be problematic to figure out. Riku’s probably the same, if courier training is even half as good as Gai-sensei’s mission prep.

If they can escape and get to water—a river, a lake, an ocean—Riku is worth his weight in gold. Riku fishes better than any other _shinobi_ Tenten knows, _and_ he isn’t squeamish about gutting and cleaning the fish, _and_ he can cook them. He has absolutely no sense of which forage is edible and which is deadly, but Tenten can handle that.

Minnie-sama says something, and Riku blinks at her, expression puzzled. Minnie-sama goes on, interrupted briefly by Daisy-san, who she shushes gently—Tenten recognizes the tone. Riku’s expression remains puzzled until Minnie-sama says one last statement with an air of finality, and then his eyes go wide and his face turns ashen.

“The weapon is called the keyblade,” he says, and his tone is shaky, his _everything_ shaky, all Tenten’s work undone in the space of seconds, “and Minnie thinks I have it.”

The weapon that can destroy the Heartless, bring people back, and make worlds safe from them. The _magic_ weapon. Tenten does not scoff at this, back to being calm, calm, calm. (What she wouldn’t give for a pillow and five minutes. Just five!)

“Why does she think you have it?” Tenten asks, because that’s less accusatory than _do you have it_ , and more focused than _does a keyblade look as stupid as it sounds?_

Riku swallows. His fingers twitch again, fisting the fabric of his pants. He hunches over as she looks at him, shoulders bowing, drawing inward.

Tenten counts down from twenty. If she hits zero, she’s going to pull Riku into the nearest private space and get him settled, and then she is going to hunt down Minnie-sama and Daisy-san and scream at _them_ until she feels better.

Riku starts talking at five.

“I do,” he says, and his voice is small. He flinches, then straightens, looking her in the eye. “I do have it.”

And he puts out his hand, the other still clenched over his calf, fingers held loosely open.

Tenten holds her breath.

Nothing happens.

Riku stares at his hand, brows furrowed. He retracts it, stares at his palm, and spreads his palm. He tries extending it again, but nothing happens.

Minnie-sama says something, gentle, and Riku turns a wildly confused look on her. “Yeah, I’m sure. I—I _used_ it. It can lock and unlock doors—I unlocked a seal once,” Tenten wants to hear more about _that_ , but now isn’t the time, “and, and I healed people, and…” He tries again, hand out, and Tenten’s heart aches for him.

He hasn’t even processed that it won’t come; his posture, his expression, his tone—they’re all confused, not yet hurt, not yet angry, not yet resigned. Whatever this keyblade is, Riku expects to be able to summon it to his hand, and the betrayal of that expectation hasn’t sunk in.

It will. Tenten knows from experience it will, and squeezes her eyes shut, letting go of any hope for private time to grieve or rage.

Right now, Riku needs her, and he doesn’t even realize it yet.

When she opens her eyes, devastation has just started to spill over his face.

⁂

_No heart, no friends_ , Tarzan says.

Sora’s elbows and knees are scraped as raw as Kairi’s from climbing the slick rock beside the waterfalls. The glow from behind the butterflies lights her face up blue, turns her eyes a deeper purple than they’ve ever been. There’s a streak of blood on her face where the Heartless caught her; she’s healed it, of course, but the proof is still there.

“I’m sorry for fighting,” Sora says. “I know you’re just worried about Riku.”

Surprise flickers over Kairi’s face before she nods. “And you’re worried about everyone.”

That isn’t a return apology. It also isn’t an acceptance of _his_ apology. Sora shifts uneasily. Kairi is fully capable of starting a fight back up even when the other person wants to declare it over—only she rarely does that to her friends, and never to _him_.

Riku’s caught it a few times, but never Sora.

“I’m sorry, too,” Donald says, and that eases some tension in Kairi.

She nods, puts her hand out to Sora, and says, “I’m sorry, Sora.”

He takes her hand, pulls her into a hug that Goofy turns into a group hug. Nothing is really _resolved_ , but things feel more settled.

No heart, no friends—no friends, no heart. They’re all in this together. They have to be, if they want to find Riku and the King, if they want to save the worlds.

“All for one,” Goofy says, squeezing his long arms around all three of them, “and one for all.”

⁂

Riku can’t panic. Tenten expects him to—she’s back to using the soft, soothing voice Riku’s already sick of, like she expects him to fly apart at a single sharp syllable. Minnie and Daisy look between them with frowns, but that’s not nearly as important as keeping his breaths all in order, one lungful of air after another.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Tenten asks. At least this time she doesn’t give him permission to say no, like he’s a child who needs to hear that.

Part of him does want to say _no_ , is the thing; if she gives that permission, he might take it. But that means they won’t figure this out, and they _need_ to figure this out.

(His key could have saved Konoha? Could have saved Cat, and—everything, every _one_? All he’d had to do was summon it.

It might not have worked then—but at least he’d have _tried_.)

So he nods instead of saying no and lets Tenten take the lead. She’s older, anyway. More experienced. More competent.

If he had the key, he could give it to her, like he gave it to Sasuke, Sora, and Kairi. _She_ would use it when she needed to. _She_ wouldn’t let people and worlds fall to darkness just because she forgot about it.

Tenten has all sorts of weapons in her arsenal and never forgets a single one; Riku had the most important weapon in all the worlds and it didn’t even _occur_ to him to pull it out.

No wonder the key won’t come to him; he wouldn’t come to him, either. All that time, so many people’s efforts, and Riku’s still just a useless kid, staring in shock at what he’s done, incapable of fixing it.

(Sora’s blood on his hands and Sora’s scream in ears.)

Tenten’s patient voice pulls him out of his thoughts. “When was the last time you remember having it?”

Like the key is just—misplaced somewhere. Like he can find it if he retraces his steps.

To the side, Minnie gives Daisy some quiet instructions, and Daisy leaves the room. Riku wants to draw his knees up, to hide his face, but that’s childish. He’s responsible for this mess; he has a responsibility to face it head-on, not hide from it.

“After Mist. Tsunade wanted me to figure out how I unlocked a seal. I couldn’t,” he adds, twisting that knife. In the end, what _had_ he accomplished with the key? A whole lot of nothing for anyone else—except Kimimaro, which is probably bad for Konoha. Was bad for Konoha. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? The Heartless probably got him, too, and everyone else in Sound, from whatever “recruits” didn’t make it out all the way to Orochimaru himself. Karin, Kabuto, Sasame, the hulking guy who broke Riku’s arm—they’re all Heartless themselves by now. “And then courier training ramped up, and I didn’t have time.”

Tenten looks like she’s swallowing down several different responses. Riku wishes she wouldn’t. Whatever condemnation she wants to heap on him, he can take it—deserves it, really. And if she bottles it up, she’ll just make herself miserable, and it’ll come out eventually, anyway.

“You’re sure you didn’t use it on any courier missions?”

Riku wrinkles his nose. “No. I told Tsunade I wouldn’t. I couldn’t risk anyone finding out, not after.” Pause.

It doesn’t matter, now that Konoha is gone. It can’t, can it? Riku’s already told Tenten about the key, and Tsunade was _very_ clear that he wasn’t supposed to do that.

Minnie mentioned the key first, though, and it’s relevant. That Orochimaru knows about it isn’t, not really.

Tenten accepts his hesitation and doesn’t press. She asks, “Did anything weird happen between the last time you summoned it and when we left Konoha?”

The question forces Riku to think. Logical sequences help: he considers the series of events, starting with the last time he attempted to unlock a seal (and failed miserably), going through the last leg of his training and then his first, second, and third courier missions.

He blinks. “I didn’t summon it on the Islands.”

“That’s weird?”

He shrugs. “Usually I do.” Why hadn’t he? —Because Hinata went with him, and she’d off-handedly mentioned that Tsunade’s instructions were stricter this time.

Because of that, Riku, Sora, and Kairi hadn’t practiced with their keys at all, and Riku hadn’t showed them any new jutsu. He’d gauged their progress with conditioning and basic attack and defense patterns, and he’d demonstrated a more complicated _kata_ for them, but that was it.

“Do you think that would affect anything?” Tenten’s voice stays judgment-free. How much is that costing her?

“I don’t think so.”

The key can get sulky, like it has a personality, but that’s never stopped it from appearing altogether before. Not like this.

Then again, he’s never let his world fall to darkness before. Maybe whatever made the key come to him before is gone, along with Konoha and his uncle and Gai and—

“Riku, I’m gonna need you to breathe with me. Okay?”

He isn’t having a panic attack, but he lets Tenten scoot closer, take his hand, and put it over her lungs. He lets her count them off: in-two-three-four-five, hold-two-three-four-five, out-two-three-four-five.

A sob catches him unawares on the first breath in. Tenten lets him choke through it, counts them off again, again, again, inching closer each time, until he’s crying into her shoulder and there isn’t a single thought in his mind.

⁂

“There was another weird gummi in that keyhole,” Sora says, pulling the two out and holding one in each hand.

The whole group stare at them.

“Cid will probably know what to do with them,” Kairi says, poking one. “We could go back to Traverse Town.”

Sora presses the map button—which is confusingly close to the shoot-missiles button, and Kairi mistakenly pressing one in place of the other is a running joke between Sora and Donald and _perfectly understandable_ , thank you very much. “There’s another world between here and there.”

Kairi makes a face. On the one hand, a new world means a new opportunity to find Riku. On the other hand, if he _isn_ _’t_ there…

“It’ll take us a lot longer to double-back from Traverse Town,” Sora says, wheedling tone that regularly earns him extra helpings of dessert or treats from everyone’s mothers. “C’mon, it’s the last one I can see on this map. We’ll go _straight_ to Traverse Town afterward. I promise!”

Kairi exchanges a look with Donald, who manages to convey a grimace entirely through eyebrows and crossed arms.

“We’ll make it quick,” Kairi says, a compromise. “If we’re not done there by noon tomorrow, we head back to Traverse Town.” It’s early afternoon now; the Deep Jungle seemed to take forever to walk through, but it was really only a few hours. Hopefully, this world would be similarly short, but Kairi’s willing to sleep somewhere on it and give Sora tomorrow morning, too.

Sora cheers and sets course for the last unvisited world straightaway, while Kairi returns to practicing her chakra control.

⁂

Daisy-san comes back with steaming mugs and a box of tissues.

Riku, being fifteen, is too embarrassed to take the latter, but _not_ too embarrassed to have left tears and snot all over the shoulder of her shirt. Ugh. Tenten sips her mug and feels her eyebrows raise sharply when she tastes something much thicker than tea, sweeter than coffee.

Riku blows on the brown liquid in his mug and takes a careful sip. “Hot chocolate,” he says, and within a minute, has his mug drained.

Tenten drinks hers more slowly, savoring it. She lets the mug warm her fingers and lets her eyes slide closed. It isn’t as good as screaming into a pillow, but it releases some knot of tension in the back of her neck.

The mug fits between her palms; within a few minutes, hers is as empty as Riku’s, and she has to set aside everything else to deal with the current catastrophe.

Gai-sensei’s team was _never_ supposed to be the one dealing with catastrophes like this, either individually or together. _Causing_ problems, sure; cleaning up other teams’ messes that could be fixed with violence, absolutely.

This is not a mess that she can fix with violence.

Probably.

Riku seems a little more stable and a little sleepy, despite his extended nap in Cat’s dome. Emotional upheaval will do that to a person, and if he naps, Tenten can a) fix this, and b) find a pillow.

One thing to sort out before she bundles him off to the nearest available bed, however:

“Riku? Can you ask Minnie-sama if there’s anyone in this place that can answer questions about the keyblade?”

If Riku’s asleep, he can’t translate, but Tenten will play charades or use smoke signals or _something_.

Frustratingly, her question wakes him up; he blinks rapidly, looks down at the empty mug in his hands, and then looks over to Minnie-sama.

“Is there anyone who can tell us about the key?” he asks, not sounding _nearly_ muzzy enough for Tenten’s tastes. She’s reminded of her months-old suspicion that he has some secret medic-nin technique that lets him cheat on sleep.

Minnie-sama looks concerned. She hasn’t _stopped_ looking concerned since she and her pal caused Riku’s meltdown, and only the facts that they’ve tried to help and that Tenten would _really_ like to get a summoning contract for mice or ducks (or both!) are keeping Tenten from trying to shout the two out the room.

After thinking over Riku’s question for an inordinate amount of time, Minnie-sama replies. Tenten watches Riku’s face, heaving an internal sigh when his eyes clear and go sharp, when his jaw tightens.

“Not good news?” she guesses when Minnie-sama finishes.

Riku shakes his head. “No one here knows much about it. Daisy’s trying to find some book on it right now.” Someplace _besides_ the library? Or is this building big enough to have multiple libraries? Konoha technically has five that Tenten’s been in and a sixth for anyone with the right security clearance (not her). “The King _has_ a key, but he left on some kind of mission a while ago, and no one knows where he is or how to reach him. A couple of their officials went looking earlier this week, but they’ve been out of contact since they left.”

Tenten pauses. Now is not the time to let an ill-considered thought send Riku off the edge. “That…sounds bad,” she says, instead of _why does it sound like something bad happened to the only other guy with the key you might not still have?_

Minnie-sama says something else. Riku’s eyebrows rise, and his mouth falls open a little. Then, without translating for Tenten, he asks, “Why didn’t you say so before?”

Her response is _very_ hesitant, maybe sheepish? When she finishes, Riku frowns and says, “Could we have a minute to talk about this?”

“In a room with a bed, maybe?” Tenten says. “And a shower would be nice.”

Riku pauses, takes in the state of their clothes, the scattered twigs, leaves, and dirt that haven’t fallen off yet. He flushes and asks Minnie-sama for rooms and showers for them.

“Tell her to put us in the same room.”

Riku gives her a flat look. “No.”

“Why not?” Being in different rooms will make planning difficult; the people here may take notice if they’re constantly moving between rooms, or both staying in one when two are available, which will make secret-sharing or stealthy escapes that much harder.

“If my uncle—” Riku chokes, eyes wide, caught off guard by the grief.

Tenten reaches over, lays a hand on his shoulder, and tries to grin. It feels a bit lopsided on her face, but Riku’s expression eases at it. “He’d want us to stick together,” she says, and Riku nods, eyes damp. Tenten decides to risk an additional comment: “And he’d _really_ want you to do something he could tease you about.”

Riku’s laughter is very wet, but he agrees with her and asks for a single room.

Which is good, because Tenten’s not about to let him out of her _sight_ anytime soon. She can play up her fear of them being separated and probably talk him into leaving the bathroom door open for showers, and if Riku thinks they’re sleeping in different beds, she’ll wait for him to drop off before she disabuses him of the notion.

She’s been on a team with boys for longer than he’s been a ninja, and he passed all the preliminary instruction for medic-nin; neither of their bodies hold any secrets for the other. Plus, he _just_ got snot and tears all over her—he’s a mess of a boy, but he’s also her friend, and she isn’t about to leave him alone with whatever monsters have moved into his head.

Later, after they’ve both washed off the dirt and dried blood, after they’ve changed into clean clothes, after Riku’s managed to lay down for nearly forty minutes and Tenten’s hyperventilated in the bathroom, Riku tells her that there _is_ someone who knows about the keyblade, someone who could, possibly, help Riku.

The problem is, he lives on a different world, and Minnie-sama equipped the last ship she sent out—with two court officials looking for her husband—with all the ship-weapons they have left.

“So, if we go to Yen Sid, we have to get to him without anything to defend ourselves,” Riku finishes.

Tenten grins. “Sounds like a challenge.”

It’s a hell of a lot better than sitting around and hoping for something to do, and if it gives Riku a goal to focus on and work toward, all the better.

“Let’s have a look at this ship tomorrow, okay?” Outside the expansive windows their bedroom comes with is a gorgeous view of the castle parapets, a town sprawled out at its feet, and beyond that, a river and rolling hills. The sun kisses the horizon, washing the panorama in gold and amber, edging into warm reds.

“I feel like I’ve slept a _lot_ today,” Riku says, face scrunching up.

“I think we both need it,” Tenten tells him, gentle and honest. “C’mon, let’s pretend this is a sleepover. Tell me all about the cute courier girls.”

Riku squawks as she leaps onto the bed with him, nearly bouncing him off. There are two beds, each three times the size of hers back home; they could both starfish out and barely brush fingertips. The room itself is only saved from being cavernous by a number of beautifully woven tapestries, inoffensive landscape paintings, and warm, fuzzy rugs.

The walls are _sky blue_ , all the decorations done in darker shades of the same color. It brings out the blue in Riku’s eyes, washes him out a bit—makes him look younger, more vulnerable, and Tenten doesn’t resist the urge to grab the huge blanket thrown atop the comforter and toss it over his head.

Riku yelps at that, tries to fight his way free, and has an excellent case of bedhead when Tenten smacks him in the face with a soft, fluffy pillow. He flops down, laughing, and tries to surrender, but she isn’t having it; eventually, he gets tired of her bopping him with the pillow and takes it for himself.

The Great Pillow War of Disney Castle ends with a reluctant ceasefire, more than an hour after it started. Riku pants for breath, but the tears in his eyes are from laughter, and his lips keep twitching up involuntarily into a little smile.

His head hits one of Tenten’s artillery pillows and he shifts it to better support his neck. What a dweeb. Tenten’s not gonna let anything bad happen to him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, quietly, after she turns off the lights and returns to bed.

“Me too,” she says, and she means both _I’m glad you’re here_ , and _I’m glad I’m here for you_. “Now go to sleep.”

He snorts, rolls over so his back is to her, his front facing those big, open windows. Tenten turns the opposite way, facing toward the door, and waits for his breathing to even out in slumber before she lets herself drop off, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This turned out to be a very ninja-centric chapter, but I did want to wrap up the Deep Jungle plot after last chapter.
> 
> For everyone who predicted that Riku would have A Reaction to realizing he could've used his keyblade before the world ended: pat yourselves on the back. ~~you were right, but at what cost?~~
> 
> There is now a VERY TENTATIVE chapter count; if I hit the worlds in the order I'm planning and _nothing unexpected_ comes up, we'll finish at 15 chapters (possibly 14/15 + epilogue, because I really like epilogues y'all).
> 
> Anyone who's followed this 'verse for a while will know that something unexpected _always_ comes up, so, y'know, grain of salt, we're just as likely to end up at 18 or more chapters. (We're not gonna have _fewer_ than 15 unless I outright skip worlds, I think, which isn't in the plan right now.)
> 
> I'm aiming to post chapter 5 in **two weeks** , but that's subject to change. For example, if I fall in a Re:Mind hole and don't climb out for a week or three. The DLC _probably_ won't break my plot outline, but who knows!
> 
> A huge shoutout to everyone who's left kudos or comments on the first three chapters: you folks are wonderful! ❤💕💖 See you next time, when we'll be visiting Olympus Coliseum!


	5. Olympus Coliseum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi and Sora get their own tournament!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** ninja-canon-typical violence/injury/blood. Some text lifted straight from the game (not a lot). Bit of headcanon re: magic and how it works, the keyblade and how _it_ works.
> 
> Folks. This is a big ol' fight scene chapter. HOW DID WE GET TO THIS AGAIN.

“That makes _no sense_ ,” Kairi complains, leaned over Sora’s shoulder and glaring at the fluffy white-and-gold clouds in front of them.

In this section of gummi space, there aren’t any asteroids. There _are_ a lot of pillowy-looking clouds, and gigantic broken columns, the remains of ancient stone highways big enough for three gummi ships to fly down shoulder-to-shoulder.

Despite all appearances, the ship can’t go through the clouds. It bounces off—literally, bounces, thrust backward.

Sora lets her take over the controls and experiment for herself, retreating to the back of the ship. Kairi’s been practicing her hand seals and chakra control—both things Sora isn’t so great at. They _can_ _’t_ practice magic in a tight space like this, or at least they _shouldn_ _’t_.

Sora could try to coax another technique out of Goofy—dodge roll is _fantastically_ useful—but instead, he pulls out his new keyblade and runs through strikes and blocks. The longer reach of the Jungle King comes without any corresponding weight increase, but Sora overbalanced _just a little bit_ the first time he attached the keychain and Kairi’s bitten-off laugh promised future teasing if he does it again.

 _Her_ new keychain, Native Work, is a little _smaller_ than Snicker-snack or her original keyblade. No risk of overbalancing there. They ought to practice with each other’s keychains more often, if just so Sora can watch Kairi trip over herself once in a while.

Besides, it might be useful to switch in the middle of a battle! (Not that they have the coordination to pull that off yet, but _one day_.)

“High block, middle block, low block,” Sora mumbles to himself, starting with slow repetitions, transitioning to faster ones, then slowing down again.

When he speeds up again, he finds a shield clanging into his high block.

“Keep goin’,” Goofy says, pulling back and waiting for Sora to move down to a middle block.

Pushing _against_ something is a lot different than practicing on air; like when the cat rushed him and Sora didn’t expect to have to dodge its claws when he had it blocked. Goofy clashes into him for a few rounds before really putting his strength behind his hits, testing Sora’s stance and his footwork as much as the positioning of his keyblade.

If his footwork is shoddy, he’ll go down; Riku’s kicked both his and Kairi’s feet out from under them enough to drive _that_ lesson home, and woe betide the few times they didn’t remember to fall properly.

Goofy seems to approve of his form, though, because after eight solid repetitions, he asks, “Wanna switch?”

Sora brings his keyblade to bear on Goofy’s shield. There isn’t enough strength in his whole body to shove Goofy back, but again, having an actual opponent is a vast improvement over nothing.

“Your foot’s too far out,” Goofy says, scrutinizing Sora after his keyblade slides off Goofy’s shield and nearly takes Sora to the floor with it. “Here, lemme show you.”

He comes over, hands straightening Sora’s shoulder, smoothing the hunch of his back; one of his feet nudges Sora’s over until he’s satisfied and returns to stand in front of Sora, shield raised once more.

“Try it now.”

Sora does, and finds more power behind his strike. “That’s great! Thanks!”

Goofy beams.

⁂

The goat won’t let them become heroes until they learn magic.

Sora’s pouting up a storm, and Kairi’s torn between suggesting they go to Traverse Town after all—there’s no sign of Heartless around here anyway—and trying to learn the magic on the scroll Phil thrust at Sora.

Donald’s still puzzling over it; apparently, the written-language-barrier is magic-proof. Kairi tried to read it over his shoulder, and while some of the letters look like actual _letters_ , the combinations they’re in make no sense.

Αστραπή, the scroll reads at the top. Aotpann? Aotpam? That isn’t even a _word_.

The courtyard at the front of the Coliseum is helpfully one big patch of dirt, great for practicing spells. Kairi helps Sora with his Blizzard while Donald glares the scroll into submission.

“How are you _so bad_ at magic,” Kairi mutters, and sighs at the flash of hurt on Sora’s face. “I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. Just—this is easy for me; I don’t understand why it isn’t for you.”

“Well, _you_ picked the staff,” Sora says. “I gave it up. Of course this is harder for me.”

Kairi stares.

Sora tries Blizzard again and gets little snowflakes to come out, at least, before he notices Kairi’s attention, her furrowed brows and gaping mouth. “What?”

“What, what? You _picked_? When did you have the dream?”

It’s Sora’s turn to stare at that. “Right before the Islands went down? Same as you? I meant to ask what you picked, since you hadn’t decided, but it’s obvious now, isn’t it?”

Kairi’s ears ring. She’d thought—when she hadn’t had the dream, she’d assumed Sora hadn’t, either. She thought maybe it was unique to Riku, or that it would come later.

She hadn’t thought it would’ve skipped _just_ her.

“I didn’t,” she says, in a small voice, and Sora’s eyes widen.

Behind them, Donald shatters the moment with a shout of, “I got it!” There’s no time to focus on feeling, once more, that she’s been left behind—instead, Kairi throws all her attention at the new spell Donald comes over to teach them.

Fire feeds on anger; Blizzard, on loneliness, not actually hatred, no matter what the Cheshire Cat said.

This new spell, Thunder, requires her to take Fire and boil it further, into pure condensed rage. Or fear, which sits right next to anger that sharp.

Kairi doesn’t _get_ that angry—but fear, that she can do. At first, she misaims, hits Blizzard again—fear of being alone is like a childhood blanket she can’t quite shake off. But she tries, thinks about how she felt all the way back in Traverse Town, when Sora was so much stronger and faster to pick the keyblade stuff up, when all Kairi could do was trip over her own feet and watch him from a ditch.

It isn’t a good feeling; it’s about the ugliest emotion she’s experienced. Bringing it to the forefront of her mind anyway, feeling it and accepting it, sends sparks from the tip of her keyblade, followed by a lightning strike where she’d been aiming.

Four more lightning strikes and Kairi’s decided: Thunder is _amazing_. It’s the most natural thing in the world to cast. She quickly sheds the need to throw her emotions into the keyblade to make it cast—it’s like her magic just _knows_ how to shape the lightning the way she wants it.

Less than an hour after learning the spell, Kairi’s proficient enough to cast it through her bare hand, not the keyblade.

“Calm down, calm _down_ ,” Donald tells her, “before you hit one of _us_.”

But there’s no chance of that, not even when Kairi chains one-two-three lightning strikes before running out of magic. Her magic goes where _she_ wants it to go. Magic may not be chakra, but Riku drilled control into her and Sora both, and the lessons transfer easily enough.

Sora, meanwhile, is still working through Blizzard. He can get the blast, now, but not every time.

“Think Phil will let us enter if only one of us can do that spell?” he asks when he’s given up for now.

Donald ostentatiously clears his throat. Sora doesn’t correct himself.

“Only one way to find out,” Kairi puts in, before it can become a fight.

⁂

So what if Sora isn’t good with magic? Sora’s good at _hitting Heartless_ , and at the end of the day that’s what matters most.

The more Heartless he hits, the fewer of the creatures are around to eat people’s hearts. The fewer there are, the safer all the worlds are.

It’s his _job_ to hit the Heartless, really.

(Kairi…doesn’t seem to get that, still. She just wants to find Riku and—Sora’s not sure what the plan is after that, honestly, because there’s no way _Riku_ will abandon all the worlds to get gobbled up by Heartless.

Sora doesn’t want to make Riku wait, he just—doesn’t want to let anyone down.)

Phil, meanwhile, looks unimpressed at them both. “Well, you got the spell, I suppose,” and his doubtful gaze lingers on Sora, singed, sulking, and sweatier than always-perfect Kairi, “but that’s not enough! You four need to work on your teamwork if you want to be _real_ heroes. Come back when you’re serious!”

And then he shoos them out, just like that.

“I,” Kairi starts to say, heated, when she’s cut off by a looming shadow of a man.

His _head_ is on _fire_. Is that normal, here? Sora throws a wild look Kairi’s way and catches her own bewildered expression.

“Rather stubborn old goat, wouldn’t you say?”

Sora’s tongue is stuck to the inside of his mouth in shock, but thankfully, Donald doesn’t have that problem. “Who are you?” he asks, and he’s suspicious about it, brandishing his staff and squinting up at the stranger.

“Whoa, hold on there, fuzz boy,” the man says, holding his hands up. “Wait, wait, lemme guess. You want to enter the games, right?” He puts a hand on Kairi’s shoulder, and something like a Thunder spell crackles down Sora’s spine. “Well then hey, get a load of _this_.” He brandishes a—piece of paper?—in his free hand.

His _previously empty_ free hand. Is this guy some kind of magician? Sora’s eyes narrow, focus reduced to where the man still rests his hand on Kairi’s shoulder.

“A pass?” she asks, ignoring that hand, focusing on the paper. Pass. Whatever.

“All yours,” the man says, reaching down to place it in her hand. Which he then _pats_ , like he might pat an obedient dog. “Good luck, kids. I’m pulling for you, shorty.”

And. He! Ruffles! Her hair! Like he _knows her_. Sora seethes.

Kairi jerks away instantly, and the man laughs as he backs off, disappearing through the door that takes _them_ to their gummi ship and takes him who-even-cares-where. Once he’s gone, Kairi tucks the pass away and starts smoothing out her hair, running her fingers through it like his touch was sand that she needs to scrape out.

Sora comes over and helps. She leans in and lets him scratch her scalp lightly, combing from roots to tips.

“Thanks,” she says, giving him a shy smile. He returns it.

⁂

Sora isn’t sure which Heartless are worse: the little flying ones that can cast magic, or the big ones that absorb all hits from the front.

Sora bounces off the second kind _so many times_. Kairi’s strategy is mostly to zap ‘em with Thunder (or, occasionally, Fire), but when she’s out of magic, she’s taken to launching herself at the big ones, getting a foot on their bulk, and bouncing _up_. From there, she can throw her keyblade down or at one of the annoying flying Heartless.

They’ve also figured out that, while they can’t exactly _use_ each other’s main keyblades, if Sora tosses his up to Kairi, she can in turn catch it and send it at another enemy.

If they try to hold onto each other’s keyblades, that doesn’t work for long, but using them for a quick attack like that _does_. Sora figures it out first, and uses it more than Kairi, honestly—because she can use her hands for magic, while Sora’s a lot stronger and more accurate at hurling their keys.

They mop up the first few rounds of Phil’s tournament. Between Sora and Kairi mowing down the main horde, Goofy keeping stray attacks off them, and Donald taking out stragglers, they speed through the fights in record time. Phil looks impressed. After each round, Sora strikes a different victory pose.

Kairi rolls her eyes, but goes along with him: when he flexes, she flexes; he throws his arms up, she punches the air; he holds his keyblade aloft, she holds hers up as well. Once, in the semifinal round, she throws herself at him in pride and accomplishment, and he lifts her up and spins her, both laughing hard enough that they almost fall over in their giddiness.

Then they get to the final match, against a man nearly as tall as Leon, with a sword as tall as Sora and almost as wide. The man, Cloud Strife, wields that giant hunk of metal like it weighs no more than Sora’s keyblade: he keeps it off the ground in a middle guard until he’s ready to strike.

At first, he circles. Sora and Kairi, by unspoken agreement, move to flank him from opposite sides. Goofy rushes in while Donald hangs back and shoots a Thunder spell at Strife, who shrugs it off like it’s nothing.

Sora swallows.

Strife sidesteps Goofy’s attack, a thrust of his shield that Strife could have just blocked. But moving out of the way overbalances Goofy, sends him stumbling forward—Strife could stab at his now-unprotected back—

Instead, Strife takes a running start, launches himself into the air like Kairi has been for the last hour, and stabs downward with _force_ at the others. Sora gets out of the way of the main strike, but not fast enough to dodge the little shockwave that follows.

Sora hits the ground as Strife yanks his sword out of it, turning on him. Scrambling backwards and up onto his feet, Sora knows, _knows_ he isn’t fast enough. He gets his keyblade into a guard position in time to block Strife’s slash at his chest, that _giant_ man-killer blade scraping along the long shaft of Sora’s Jungle King keyblade.

(Sora would try to angle it so Strife’s sword got caught in the teeth of his keyblade, but he’s more than a little afraid they would _snap off_ , and he doesn’t know how to repair the keyblade if it ever does break like that.)

Strife grunts and then presses forward into a lunge, twisting his blade to avoid Sora’s guard. But there’s only one of him, and Kairi’s Snicker-snack jams in between the blade and Sora’s fragile body, the toothless dragon head of it catching Strife’s blade. Kairi has no fear of breaking her magic sword as she throws her shoulder into it, pivoting her feet and deflecting Strife’s blade to the side and down.

No fear: she follows that with a point-blank fireball to his face. A normal man would have taken the hit. A normal man would have _died_. All the blood drains out of Sora’s face as his breath catches in his throat.

Strife just ducks under it, reflexes ninja-fast, and rolls to the side to get a better angle for his next strike, this one an upward slash that disarms Kairi.

Except Kairi is _right next_ to Sora, and Jungle King is still extended in a guard. Kairi grabs it while Snicker-snack still spins in the air overhead, swings Sora’s keyblade with the teeth pressed against her arm, the hilt catching Strife in the elbow. He winces, backs up a step, doesn’t show any other signs of damage.

Jungle King dissolves out of Kairi’s hand, replaced by Snicker-snack. Donald’s Blizzard catches Strife in the side and the man grunts, swings his attention over to where the other two are.

Sora’s magic isn’t as strong as the others, but he _has_ it. His Fire spell hits Strife’s sword, though, raised in a split-second block.

“Here he comes!” Kairi warns, rolling to the side as Strife shifts his position. That’s all the warning Sora gets before Strife launches four back-to-back lunges. The first, he just barely evades; the second time, Strife’s sword catches his arm, rips through his sleeve and leaves a long, deep, painful gouge. The third attack carries Strife over to Kairi, who…disappears?

Ah—substitution jutsu, switching out with one of Phil’s numerous pots. Sora frowns, lines up his shot with where he thinks Strife _will_ be after the final attack. He pulls back to let his keyblade fly. How the substitution jutsu doesn’t get Kairi disqualified—but then, just as Strife’s last strike lands heavily on Goofy’s shield, Kairi reappears. Body flicker this time, since she was out of Strife’s attack radius, and even Riku was pretty sure you can only use the “body replacement jutsu” to swap yourself out for something inanimate when you’re being attacked.

(Plus, Sora and Kairi have tried, and while they’re not always successful at getting it to work when they _are_ taking swings at each other with wooden swords, their successes have only come from evading direct, imminent attacks. Sora got a near-miss to work once, but at the time, he’d been sure it would land.)

Kairi takes prompt advantage of her position behind Strife. Her keyblade falls across his back in sync with Sora’s. Strife collapses to his knees under the simultaneous blows, his sword dug into the arena floor the only thing keeping him from pitching forward.

Kairi doesn’t take Strife’s apparent surrender for granted, though. She digs her foot into his ribs, nudging at him as if checking to see whether he’ll fall. Her keyblade, steady in her hand, stays poised to defend if he tries anything.

Strife doesn’t, just gives a little grunt and sways on his knees.

There’s something Sora ought to do—something he should say—he opens his mouth, his hand outstretched—

Whatever he meant to do falls away when a giant black paw descends on Cloud and Kairi, crushing them both to the ground. Sora hears them call out, hears himself scream her name, brandishes his keyblade in rage at the giant three-headed dog _stepping on his friend_.

He starts toward it, intent on pounding that paw with his keyblade until it _lets her go_ , but Goofy picks him up under the armpits. Arms and legs flailing, paying no attention to how his sharp, panicked movements send blood pouring down his left arm, Sora screams, “Let me go! Let me go! I have to save her! Kairi! _Kairi!_ ”

Between his own limbs and the unshed tears in his eyes, Sora doesn’t quite make out what the shape pushing the dog back is, just that it’s big and broad and _there_ , where _he_ ought to be. Sora doesn’t really register meaning in Goofy’s panicky, “C’mon, Sora!” or Donald’s stuttering cry.

He hears a man’s voice call, “Phil, get them out of here!” But it holds no meaning for him, because the dog’s paws are clawing at the air above Kairi and Cloud’s prone forms, and Sora _has to get over there_.

“Let go of me!”

“Phil!”

“Herc will take care of it, c’mon!”

Goofy hauls Sora out of the arena, no matter how hard Sora squirms or how wildly he kicks out. His arms pinwheel without catching on anything—with how Goofy holds onto him, Sora can’t put his hands together to form a seal, even if he _could_ think of one that would help.

Which he can’t. His heart pounds in his ears. He can’t _think_. His sleeve clings, tacky, to his arm. Sweat sticks his jumpsuit to his shoulder blades, his lower back. Sweat and tears drip down his face, stick his eyelashes together, slick his cheeks and jaw. There are half-a-dozen bruises along his torso and legs from the earlier fights with Heartless.

None of that matters, because, “ _Kairi_ , no, you have to let me—she’s still back there, Kairi, _Kairi_ —”

Donald doesn’t shut the door, quite, but he does close it _most_ of the way, and Sora sobs. Goofy lowers him to the ground and Sora _bolts_.

Phil trips him. Sora sprawls across the floor and sobs harder. There’s dirt here, tracked in from outside, but he doesn’t care. He pushes himself up onto hands and knees, wipes his face just enough to clear his vision, and—

Donald sits on his back, sending him back to the floor. _“Oof_. Get off me! I have to—”

“Herc is a grade-A hero, kid,” Phil says. “You have to let him do his _job_. This sort of thing is what he does best.”

“I don’t _care_ ,” Sora shouts, pounds his fists on the floor. “ _Kairi_ _’s_ out there!”

If Riku were here, he would’ve come up with something to do. Something smart and brave, something heroic. It would’ve _worked_. But Sora’s brain is awash in an endless torrent of _Kairi_ _’s in danger Kairi’s in danger Kairi’s in danger_ that floods out all other thoughts.

“Calm down,” Phil says. “Herc won’t let anything happen to those two.”

Sora grits his teeth. Blood drips from his wounded arm. He can smell it more than he feels it: all he can feel is his heartbeat thudding away and the cool floor underneath his forehead.

In the silence that follows Phil’s confident statement, Donald says, softly, “Cure.” The magic tingles through Sora, robbing him of the myriad of aches throughout his body. The gouge in his arm that Cloud’s sword opened seals shut.

Sora’s ears still ring with his heartbeat, though. He takes a deep breath, a second, a third, and pushes himself up to his knees, forcing Donald off him.

“I’m going back for her,” he says. His voice sounds rough even to himself, but quiet. “I’m not afraid. If staying back here and letting someone else handle things is what it means to be a hero, count me out.”

When he steps out into the sunlit arena, the three-headed dog has forced Herc up against a wall as far from the exit as possible. There’s no sign of Kairi or Cloud at first—not until Sora, Donald, and Goofy catch the dog’s attention and it turns to face them, growling and snarling.

Then, Herc edges past it and breaks into a dead run, a body thrown over each shoulder.

Behind him, Phil calls something out. Sora isn’t paying attention. All his attention is on the giant dog that _hurt Kairi_.

It rears up and slams its front paws down, but after all the big monsters Sora’s fought that do that, after _Cloud_ pulled that off with just his big sword, Sora expects and dodges the wave of force. Then the dog snarls again and darts forward, its three heads snapping down in turns to try to take bites out of anyone too close.

Sora isn’t close, though; he’s behind it, trying to hit its back legs.

Well. No. He _is_ hitting its back legs, that just isn’t _doing_ much. Even when he flips back and throws his keyblade with all his might, it doesn’t even make the dog _twitch_. Is its hide too thick, maybe? Sora frowns. If that’s the problem, where—?

Way too fast for its bulk, one head lunges backward and tries to savage him. Sora ducks underneath it, takes an experimental stab at its underbelly. The dog _howls_ , all three heads, and tries to get him with both its back legs _and_ one of those heads, tucking under its chest to snap at him upside-down.

Sora can’t dodge both outright and stay where he is, so he feints like he’s moving toward its legs and then rolls out from under its armpit. He has to hold off its saliva-dripped maw with his keyblade, which it tries to snap like a bone before he makes it disappear.

Jungle King does sort of _look_ like a bone. Sora pelts away from the dog, re-summons his keyblade as soon as he feels far enough away for relative safety. No nicks, no bent parts—best of all, no dog drool.

Grinning, Sora turns to face the dog again, just in time to see it straighten from _vomiting up_ this gross purple-black gunk.

The pool of gunk fades like the Heartless do, and that’s Sora’s only warning. It isn’t enough. The first blast of what he would later find out is darkness hits him full force.

It doesn’t feel like darkness; it just feels like pain, with an edge of despair. His vision spots, and that makes avoiding the next blast difficult. He manages to stumble away, hurrying his steps each time darkness puddles beneath his feet.

Then the dog begins shooting _balls of lava_ out of its _three mouths_ , and that just isn’t fair!

Sora hurriedly scans the arena as he runs. He blocks one lava-ball, and boy, is _that_ a mistake. Darkness spears through him again, leaving his limbs weak and shaky, his teeth rattling, his vision dark around the edges and even spottier. A quick Cure clears up a lot of that, but not all the spots. The keyblade trembles in his grip, and Sora can’t even convince himself it’s just because the three-headed dog’s steps shake the arena.

Donald is collapsed next to the stands, toward the middle. Goofy stands next to him, shield raised up in defense. No help there, but at least Sora shouldn’t need to worry about them.

Sora grits his teeth as the dog settles down in front of him, heads dipping down to try to make him dinner. Sora ducks backward, avoiding the whole affair, and tries to _think_.

It has the vomit-attack that follows Sora around; it has the lava-balls that home in on him; it has its teeth and claws. He can’t get in close, but maintaining a distance and picking it off with thrown attacks won’t work, either. It’s big, but it’s quick.

Out of desperation more than strategy, Sora waits for one head to lower and then boomerangs his keyblade at its face. Most things’ faces are vulnerable, aren’t they?

That head jerks back; the other two howl. Sora grins. _Bingo_.

Now with a target, Sora feels a lot better as the dog vomits up darkness again and follows it with more lava-balls. He doesn’t quite have a plan so much as a tactic, but still. He circles around the dog, and then, in one quick burst of chakra-enhanced muscles, launches himself up, up, and onto the dog’s flank.

Its fur isn’t thick enough to hold onto, really, and there aren’t any other convenient handholds, so Sora tumbles off after less than a second. The dog takes the opportunity to try to bite his prone form, and Sora rolls away, regains his feet, and smacks the nearest head.

The next time he gets on its back, he stays on for a few heartbeats longer. Its back _ripples_ , muscles clenching and releasing underneath him to unsettle his footing. This time, when he tumbles down, he lands on his feet, all the better to hit its looming faces.

Still, Sora doesn’t give up. The third and final time he leaps up, he manages to stay on the dog, moving with it as he makes his way along its back and to its heads.

They can’t maneuver well enough to dig their teeth into him when he settles astride the middle neck—not if he tucks his legs right up against the warm skin, clenching an ear with his free hand while he pulls Jungle King back.

Hitting a dog feels _wrong_ , but this one’s a monster. Sora brings the keyblade down. Thankfully, he does _not_ hear a crack, just a loud _thunk_ before he nearly loses his position as the neck turns to dead weight, head lolling forward to dump Sora on his butt where the other two can tear him to pieces.

That’s when Donald recovers and zaps one of those heads with Thunder, while Goofy’s shield bangs into the other. The whole dog slumps at that, periodic twitching the only sign it’s still alive.

Afterward, Kairi comes to and looks mostly irritated to have missed the whole thing, and then she picks a fight with Phil when he tries to give her a Hero License too.

“I didn’t _do_ anything, though!”

Kairi’s strident refusal to accept the honor takes the wind out of Sora and Donald’s sails to protest only being _junior_ heroes. She only gives up when Phil threatens to keep her out of the next tournament if she doesn’t accept.

“I _will_ prove myself, though,” she says, her voice pure acid, her eyes daring anyone to voice their doubts. “Just you wait and see!”

She marches out ahead of the others, and Sora follows, hands laced behind the back of his head. Seeing her this determined reminds him of the Islands—of how she would get, sometimes. She would throw herself into things full-force, and woe to anyone who got in her way. He grins.

His grin slips when he sees Cloud, sitting on the steps between them and the exit to their ship. Cloud looks—small, thoughtful, not like the guy who wields a slab of metal and calls it a sword.

Kairi pauses, then continues marching ahead. Sora stops Donald and Goofy from following her. “I think she has some things to say to him,” he tells them, when Donald at least looks like he’ll ignore Sora and charge right ahead.

If Cloud hadn’t worked with Hades, Cerberus wouldn’t have smashed Kairi into the ground. That’s reason enough to dislike the guy. But—he got hurt, too, and he’s _old_. It probably hurt his pride worse than Kairi’s, to have to be rescued by Hercules.

After a few minutes, Kairi turns and waves.

“He won’t agree to a rematch,” she says when Sora, Donald, and Goofy walk up, “but he _will_ teach us that chain-attack he was doing.”

“The one you nailed him on?” Sora asks, grinning at Cloud, teasing.

Cloud rolls his eyes. “It won’t protect you if your enemies come from behind,” he says, and it’s an acknowledgment, but it also sounds a little like Cloud’s judging them for their tactics.

“No attack is perfect,” Kairi says with a shrug.

Cloud shoots her a withering look, but sighs and picks up his giant sword. He demonstrates foot positioning to them, where their weapon should be when they begin, how they need to move into it—

And then he steps them through what is _clearly_ the magic equivalent of boosting a jump or a hit with chakra. Cloud doesn’t say it in so many words, but when he talks about drawing power out and thrusting forward with more than just their swords, it _clicks_ for Sora.

It. Doesn’t click for Kairi.

Cloud spends near forty minutes going through it with them. By the end of it, Sora has a stamp of approval: he is ready to use the attack, Sonic Blade, on Heartless. Kairi is still struggling, though.

Sora doesn’t want to break the world order by saying anything, but he’s pretty sure she’s trying to throw chakra _and_ magic into her strikes, and they’re canceling each other out. Sora isn’t a sensor-type by any means, but that’s the only explanation that fits how snarly and frustrated and wrung-out Kairi looks.

“You have the basic movements down,” Cloud says, skeptically, and it sounds like he’s hit a wall, too. Some mentor he is; even Riku’s ninja teachers didn’t give up after less than an hour, and Riku’s made clear that there were a _lot_ of things he didn’t pick up the first twelve times he tried them.

“I’ll help her practice,” Sora says. “I’m sure you’ve got other stuff to do. Like training for our rematch!”

Cloud has a small little smile on his face as he walks away from them. He drags it out, very dramatic, for a few more steps, then pauses. “I think I’ll pass.” He runs a hand through his bangs, glancing at them over his shoulder, and then heads back inside the Coliseum.

Kairi stares after him, a complicated expression on her face. When Sora makes an inquisitive noise, she just shakes her head. “I never thought we’d meet someone with spikier hair than yours,” she says, and Sora grins and plays up his offense, because if Kairi’s teasing him, that means they’re all good again.

All they need to do is find Riku, and then everything will be _perfect_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love to the handful of people who went through and kudos'd _every story in this series_ in a single day! idk if y'all are getting enough sleep, sunshine, and water, but I salute your dedication and appreciate that you enjoyed the story thus far!! (with that said, go drink some water.)
> 
> For those who don't follow me on Twitter and therefore don't see my middle-of-the-night tweets, a story update: the end of the first act is written, I'm 80-90% through the first chapter of the next act. 
> 
> Quick question, to all current readers: if there's stuff in upcoming chapters that I would tag for, would you all prefer those tags in advance, or to wait and avoid the suspense/spoilers until I post those chapters? ( **NOT** any of the big 4 warning tags besides Graphic Violence, just what I'd put in the story tags or chapter content notes.) 
> 
> Next chapter ought to be up in **two weeks** , around **February 15-16**. (Also, I almost hit 50k in January. I'm super psyched about that--most of that wordcount is even usable, which is amazing. I'm not necessarily aiming to keep up that pace, but if I can maintain even a bit of it, I should be able to keep up the twice-monthly updates until this story finishes. FINGERS CROSSED.)


	6. Traverse Town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi and Sora return to Traverse Town, rendezvous with Merlin and the Fairy Godmother, talk some, and get into a fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** major character injury, some further headcanons re: magic and darkness

Running errands for Cid and Leon is—well, at least it’s something Kairi can do.

After Cerberus, she’ll count that as a win.

Merlin has a _lot_ of ideas: about magic, about the keyblade, about _Kairi’s magic_. Girls are supposed to be better at magic than boys, apparently, and better at White Magic most of all.

Sora doubles over laughing at that one, and even Donald looks incensed as he explains to Merlin that Kairi’s specialty is _Black_ Magic, thank you very much.

“She can cast Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder,” Donald says.

“And Cure, I presume,” Merlin says with a twinkle in his eye.

The Fairy Godmother tuts something under her breath from across the room; Sora, still tossing the stone Leon gave them up and down, laughs and says, “Aw, this is _nothing_ , you should’ve seen the scrapes we got at home!”

Kairi glances down, at her scratched, scabbing knees and bruised arms and calves. Fighting through the Heartless to get here wasn’t much of a challenge, but one of the Large Bodies had bounced her into a wall. Sora’s whole right side is still wet from where a Blizzard spell nailed him, though.

They wrap up quickly, waving off Merlin’s reminder to look at the book Cid restored for him. (Kairi also ignores the Fairy Godmother’s comments about how _cold_ she looks, and wouldn’t she like something that covered her more?) They leave and make a game of hopping across the floating islands—Kairi gets across in a series of handsprings and flips, while Sora crosses a little more slowly, trying to hop across using _just_ his left leg, his right pulled up like a stork’s.

Donald squawks at them to stop messing around, but he’s just sore because he falls off the first one and has to swim back to shore.

⁂

Leon and the others have a little house all set up—still a bit cluttered, not quite moved-in let alone lived-in, but it’s impossible to miss the two twin beds.

“We didn’t mean to stick you guys way out in the middle of nowhere,” Yuffie says as she gives them the grand tour of a place about the same size as Riku’s apartment in Konoha. “It’s just, all the closer places were kind of trashed.”

“This isn’t just for you,” Leon says. “It’s also our headquarters.”

Yuffie leans in to whisper, “Because Aerith’s tired of meeting in his secret underground mancave.”

Leon’s scowl says he heard her, but he ignores the comment.

“Anyway, you kids need ta be careful around here,” Cid says, pulling up a chair and settling heavily into it. Leon’s holding up the wall beside him, and Yuffie bounces over—literally _bounces_ on the toes of her feet—to lean against Cid’s chair.

Aerith sits on one of the beds, braiding flowers together by their stems. Kairi finds her eyes straying over to Aerith’s hands frequently, distracted by the quick, repetitive motions.

She hasn’t made a flower necklace in what feels like years, even though it was just a week and a half ago, for the spring festival of Valefor.

The festival is always just a bit before Sora’s birthday; when they were younger, she and Riku would pretend the festival was for him, and they’d give him his presents early and pile flower crowns and necklaces and bracelets on him.

Now, he’s fourteen and Kairi doesn’t know when she’ll next get a chance to throw a flower necklace over his head and spin him around on the sand, let alone when she’ll be able to take turns trading him back and forth with Riku.

Cid says, “You guys ever hear of Maleficent? I hear she's in town.”

“Who?” Kairi asks, mind still wandering.

“A witch, kid, she's a witch!”

“Wait, witches are _real_?” Sora turns to Donald. “What’s the difference between witches and mages?”

Donald sniffs, crosses his arms over his chest. “Witches cheat.”

Everyone looks at him, but he says nothing further. Leon, after a pause, says, “I don’t know about that, but she's the reason this town is full of Heartless. Don't take her lightly.”

Aerith and the others explain. They explain how she uses the Heartless. They explain how they lost their world.

And then Leon says, “That was nine years ago,” and Kairi goes ramrod-stiff instantly.

Sora catches her reaction but not the reason for it, looking at her in concern.

“Nine years?” she chokes out. Traces over each of their faces, trying, _trying_ to remember _something_.

“That’s right,” Cid says. “I got out of that mess and came here with these guys.”

Kairi settles on him. She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t _remember_. None of them look familiar. Nine _years_. “Were you the only survivors?” she says, soft, careful, hesitant.

They all pause, all look away. Grief hangs over each of them, pulling Aerith’s hands tight together, turning Yuffie twitchy. Leon just stares at the door, jaw working. Cid’s shoulders bow, his eyes close.

“As far as we know,” Aerith says, just as soft, as careful. “Traverse Town…is a unique world. Survivors tend to wind up here.”

What none of them says: Kairi and Sora landed here, after the Islands fell.

What Kairi thinks: _nine years_. That can’t be a coincidence.

Her tongue thick in her mouth, she asks, “That wasn’t the only world to fall around that time, was it?”

The adults share heavy glances. It’s Yuffie who recovers first, who makes a so-so gesture with her hand. “Other worlds went down before ours, but ours was the last for a _while_.”

“Maleficent needed to consolidate her power base,” Leon says grimly. “That’s how we know she’s active: worlds, like yours, have started disappearing again.”

Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ —maybe it wasn’t theirs, maybe hers fell earlier. (But she doesn’t remember any stars going out in the night sky after she came to live with the mayor of a little town on the Destiny Islands. She could’ve just been too young to notice, of course.)

“Do people sometimes go to different worlds?” she asks, haltingly, tripping over the idea of it. She knows the answer already, of course—she’s lived the answer. She needs it confirmed anyway.

Cid sighs. “Ya thinkin’ ’bout yer friend?” His question is gruff, but not without sympathy. “It’s possible. Doesn’t happen often, though.”

Kairi wasn’t thinking about Riku. She should have been—should be. Riku’s out there somewhere, while the Heartless march across the worlds. Who knows how long until they reach Riku’s?

Riku has a keyblade, though. If Kairi and Sora made it off the Islands, that must have been why. If anything happens to Konoha, Riku should be able to come here, where they’ll be able to find him.

But no, Kairi wasn’t thinking about Riku at all. She was thinking about herself, nine years ago. Unconsciously, her hand comes up to where her necklace used to lay.

“I know it’s asking a lot,” she says, staring hard at the floor. “But. Would you mind, um, telling me about your world?”

They look surprised at that, and still grieving. Exchange glances, when Kairi glances up through her lashes at them, gauging. She bites her lip, about to take the question back, when Yuffie straightens, hands fisted at her sides.

“I was only seven when it happened,” she says. “I don’t remember as much as everyone else. But I remember all the flowers. They were _everywhere_. When you couldn’t see them, you could smell them—all kinds, too. The city was full of them. That’s why it was called Radiant Garden.”

Sora jerks his head up as she says _flowers_ , and his eyes grow larger the more she talks. Kairi has to look at him—can’t bear to look at Yuffie.

Yuffie was seven. Did they ever play together? How could Kairi have forgotten so much?

Aerith speaks next. “I was thirteen. My first job was tending the gardens. There was an advanced irrigation system, but they grow better when someone talks to them. Every day after school, I visited the gardens—I could walk across the city for _hours_ and still not see all of them.”

“School,” Leon says, shaking his head. “For the older kids, it included self-defense, basic weapons training. We didn’t know about the Heartless yet, but there were monsters just past the city’s borders.”

“All sorts of things past the city’s borders,” Cid agrees, standing up and pacing back and forth behind his chair. Too agitated by the memories to sit still. “The ruler at the time was Ansem. We knew ’im as Ansem the Wise, though—he was always studying, always wantin’ to know. I worked in the castle as a mechanical engineer. Was workin’ on a rocket that would take us to other worlds when. Well. Other worlds came to us.”

Yuffie steps over to him and doesn’t so much hug him as lean into him until he’s forced to hug her or else watch her topple forward at his feet. “Cid grabbed us,” she says, face half-buried in his shirt. “When the Heartless came, Cid grabbed us and got us in a half-finished rocket.”

“It couldn’t _go_ anywhere,” he says, flushing. “But it had a door and a lock. Figured it wasn’t the worst place to hole up with a bunch of kids.”

“We all lost friends,” Aerith says, sighing. “We lost _everything_.” Then her eyes meet Kairi’s, and her smile is gentle. “So, we understand what you’re going through.”

“No,” Kairi says, past the lump in her throat. It’s hard to summon the words, but impossible to leave them unsaid. “No, that’s—for me, it isn’t just the Islands.” She swallows, forces herself to meet Aerith’s eyes, then Leon’s, Yuffie’s, Cid’s. “I’ve only lived on the Islands for the past nine years. Before that, I was on a different world, and the only thing I remember about it is the flowers.”

⁂

Sora glances anxiously at the others, but none of them say anything. Cid is frowning, eyeing Kairi like he’s trying to place her. Yuffie gapes. Aerith’s hands are pressed to her mouth.

“She just showed up one day,” Sora says, in a small voice, eyes only for Kairi. “After a meteor shower. The mayor took her in.”

Kairi nods, swallows. She doesn’t look up. Sora reaches over to grab her hand, and she allows it, but doesn’t squeeze back.

Finally, Cid seems to give up, shakes his head, spreads his hands. “Well. Can’t say I remember every kid in the city—it was a big city, with a lot of rugrats. But if ya think that’s where yer from, then I say, I’m glad ya made it out in one piece. Wish more had.”

Kairi sniffs, looks up, and—oh, that’s why she kept her face down, before. Kairi _hates_ crying in front of people. She isn’t bawling or anything, isn’t snot-nosed and sobbing, but there are tracks down her cheeks, her eyes still watery, her lips trembling, her shoulders shaking.

Yuffie extends an arm where she’s still pressed into Cid’s side, and Kairi throws herself at the two of them, lets Cid envelope them in a hug while Yuffie rubs circles into her back.

Sora swallows. He wishes—he _wants_. It’s selfish and ugly, but Kairi got these people back; why can’t he have his mom or dad? Why can’t they have _Riku_?

He turns to Donald and Goofy, who look especially awkward at the teary scene. Sora jerks his head at the door and the three of them quietly exit.

Quickly followed by Leon.

He just says, “Follow me,” and leads Sora and the others to the underground lake, where they spend the next few hours training.

Leon doesn’t spar with him. He’s an even more demanding taskmaster than Riku, refusing to let Sora stop doing push-ups or wind-sprints even though his limbs feel like jelly and the ground here is slippery with moss and condensation. Goofy joins Sora in the physical exercise, while Donald settles himself against a wall and does…magic…things.

Eventually, Leon bundles them all back to the small house, where there are beds for them. Kairi’s already settled in one, looking tired, worn, small.

“There’s still a lot we need to discuss,” Leon says, “so don’t leave before you talk to one of us tomorrow.”

Sora mumbles a promise and is out before his head hits the pillow.

⁂

Kairi wakes up before the others, for once. She isn’t a naturally early riser, but after a certain point, her body refuses to let her drift back off to sleep.

She can’t tell, in Traverse Town’s perpetual gloom, exactly how early it is. Now, who here is most likely to be awake at such an early hour?

With a smothered smile, Kairi sets off for the Second District. She ducks into the hotel, uses Thunder to take care of most of the Heartless along the way—except for the yellow ones, which she mercilessly trains her Fire spell on—and drops down to the alleyway from one of the hotel room balconies. From there, it’s a quick sprint to the secret waterway.

Sure enough, Leon is already up and training, his jacket folded neatly on a dry spot next to the wall while he runs through what look like sword stances. Kairi recognizes the basics of high, middle, and low guards and strikes, but the more complicated ones aren’t familiar at all.

Leon finishes his set, then says, “Come here.”

He puts her through her paces, demands she show him each of the guard and strike stances she knows and then calls them out—quick, out of order, his hands on his hips and the bud of a scowl on his face any time she opens her mouth to make an excuse.

It’s just stances, with her keyblade out. The keyblade isn’t _heavy_. But raising or lowering it for each one, repeatedly, at a rapid pace, saps the strength from her arms.

She could crawl into her bed now and get some more sleep, but she isn’t about to give Leon the satisfaction of watching her give up.

“You’re fourteen?” he asks, and she takes the reprieve for what it is, works to steady her breathing as sweat drips from her bangs down her face.

She can’t answer for a minute, makes a wobbly gesture with her hand instead. “In a couple months,” she says. She’s a midsummer baby—or, well, that’s when she washed up on the Islands, anyway. She doesn’t actually know when she was born.

She could be fourteen already. She could be _fifteen_. She might even be twelve still. No one’s exactly sure; according to her mom, she claimed to be five when she was adopted.

Leon makes a noise of acknowledgment, surveying her. “You would have learned this, then,” he says, and Kairi looks up, sees that his eyes are closed, fingers pinched over the bridge of his nose. “You’re a bit ahead. It happens sometimes, when kids have older siblings.”

And then they go right back to stances, until Kairi’s arms shake even when they just lay at her sides. Leon watches her, careful and critical both, and sends her to walk a circuit around the cavern.

“I’ll slip,” she says.

He shrugs. “Then get back up.”

While she walks, she puzzles over him. He doesn’t watch her; instead, he goes back to his own exercises, pausing only to call out, “If you dawdle, you’ll run the circuit.”

She really will slip if she runs, so she picks up her pace.

Leon didn’t stick around to share stories last night, but this—this is sharing, too. Hadn’t he said? Older kids were trained in Radiant Garden, to fight monsters that weren’t the Heartless.

If Kairi had grown up there, she still would have learned these things. Riku taught them to her instead, and he _certainly_ isn’t her brother, but. If they’d all grown up on Radiant Garden, no Islands and no ninja, Riku still would’ve learned all this before her and Sora, still would have shared it with them.

Her life is different, but not _so_ different. That’s what Leon’s sharing with her: that she’s not so far removed from the kind of Kairi she’d be if she had gotten to grow up on her own world.

In the face of her recent failures—to master the same techniques as Sora, to even keep _up_ with him, to face down Cerberus—and on top of yesterday’s revelation about where she’s from, Kairi can’t hold in her tears.

She’d cried them all out last night, and now they’re back.

She keeps her pace as she cries until she can’t anymore, until her eyes are so clogged and her sobs so big that moving forward risks running into a wall or the edge of the water. When she can’t walk, she sits down, wiping her tears away as fast as they come, and, hiccupping, babbles at Leon, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’ll get it under control, this isn’t, I’m fine.”

It isn’t pretty crying. She’s wiping away snot as much as tears, and she doesn’t have tissues, just her shirt and skort. And then, abruptly, she has a towel, pressed against her face without care or gentleness.

It smells faintly of polishing oil—not dirty, just so often used for that task so many times that all the bleach in the world can’t get the smell out. Kairi uses it to dry her face, still hiccupping, and looks up to meet Leon’s gaze.

He kneels in front of her, places a warm, gloved hand on her shoulder. She didn’t even realize how cold the cavern was until she feels that warmth leach into her.

“Do you want to keep going?” he asks, eyes serious and without judgment. “Or do you want to go back?”

She sniffles, dabs at a few more damp spots with the towel. “I can k-keep going,” she says, and hates how her voice breaks. _Sora_ never has crying breakdowns like this. Neither did Riku.

 _Weak_ , something in her hisses, and she wants to clamp her jaws down on it. She wants to tear the weakness right out of herself.

Leon asks, again, “Do you _want_ to?”

She blinks.

“You don’t have to just because you can,” he says, and the way he says it—rote, mechanical—tells her that he’s repeating something someone told _him_.

Unfortunately, Kairi doesn’t _know_ what she wants. She wants to not be weak, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to keep training, even though the two seem related. If she trains more, she’ll _feel_ weak, and that seems as bad as _being_ weak right now.

“Can I think about it?” she asks, in a small voice. She hasn’t let go of his towel.

He nods. “Stay here until you make up your mind.” He straightens but doesn’t go back to where he set his sword down. Instead, he retrieves his jacket, and slides it over Kairi’s shoulders.

He’s so much bigger than her, it’s like wearing a blanket if she pulls her knees up to her chest. So she does. When she feels sniffly again, she presses her face into the towel until the feeling goes away.

Leon resumes his exercises, and Kairi watches him until her eyes drift closed.

⁂

Beside her, Sora mumbles, “Ring the bell three times,” like they’re in danger of forgetting such simple directions.

Even with a squadron of Heartless between the Small House—where Kairi woke up and might’ve thought she imagined everything if her hand hadn’t still been clenched tight over that towel—and the bell tower.

The flying Heartless are Kairi’s _least favorite_ , for all that they’re easy enough to take out on their own. They make it dangerous to just walk up the walls; her concentration isn’t good enough to survive being hit with Fire or Blizzard, let alone _Thunder_ , which makes all the muscles in her body lock up and her teeth ache.

That reaction, thirty feet up? Not great. Kairi takes the ladder instead—that way, Goofy can catch her if she falls.

When she makes it to the top, she’s faced with a flat expanse of rooftop. To her right, a couple of wooden boxes and a boarded-up alcove. To her left, three pillars, each decorated with a bell mosaic.

Whoever built Traverse Town was not going for subtlety.

Sora, Donald, and Goofy join her, and as soon as Donald’s up, Kairi starts for the alcove—only for more flying Heartless to materialize.

Before she can do more than groan and summon her keyblade, someone _else_ is on the roof with them.

A boy, dark-eyed and dark-haired, drops down on the first Heartless, spearing it through with a red-and-blue sword. He goes _through_ the haze of dark sparkles, landing, cloak billowing, and pivoting to stab the next Heartless.

(On his thigh, there’s a weapons-pouch.)

A Blue Rhapsody shoots ice at him; his sword comes up in a block, and then a purple-tinted fireball flies at it, cast from the boy’s hand. Without even checking that it’s destroyed, the boy turns on the last Heartless and dispatches it with a sweep of his blade.

Even the _keyblade_ doesn’t take out Heartless in one hit like that!

Kairi, Sora, Donald, and Goofy, already armed the moment the Heartless appeared, pause.

The boy’s eyes dip from their faces to the keyblades. He snorts.

“Do we…know you?” Sora asks, looking more affronted than wary at the boy’s clear dismissal.

Kairi, meanwhile, looks at his feet, at the style of sandals there, not quite covered by his cloak. She reaches with her free hand to tug Sora back by his sleeve, raises her keyblade a little higher. With the ledge behind them, they don’t have much room to retreat, but every inch counts. “He’s a ninja, Sora.”

The boy’s eyebrows tick up. His face stays blank as he looks at Kairi. She scans it, but he doesn’t look like anybody she ran into in Konoha.

His coloring would be distinctive on the Islands but was a lot less so in a city full of dark-haired, dark-eyed strangers. Still, something about that nose, that jawline, feels familiar. It must’ve been somewhere unusual, because she doesn’t remember meeting him. Her brows furrow and she frowns as she considers. The cloak hides most of his shirt; it’s black, but if there’s a design, a special cut that would jog her memory, she can’t see it. His pants are equally dark, nondescript.

“You’re not,” he says, scanning her. She and Sora don’t look anything like the ninja in Konoha: no weapons-pouches, no sandals, no bandages tying their clothes tight to their body, no forehead-protectors.

Which the boy also doesn’t have, but—Kairi frowns harder, eyes tracing where it would lay on his forehead if he _did_ —

“You’re Sasuke,” she says, bewildered, the name coming to her in a flash. She tugs on Sora’s sleeve again, drawing him even further back.

The boy’s jaw clenches, expression still blank, but—she thinks that’s frustration in his eyes, in the shadow of a wrinkle between his brows, in his clenched fists. “I don’t know you,” he says. Dismissive. Playing at indifference.

He didn’t expect to be recognized, and it’s thrown him off. Kairi grins. It isn’t a nice expression, she knows—it’s the grin she shoots at bullies who make one of her friends cry.

It’s the grin she wears when everyone’s battered and bruised and she’s sitting on one of those bullies and telling them, _Go ahead, tell my mom, and I_ _’ll tell her what_ you _did, we_ _’ll see who gets in more trouble._

“You’re one of Kakashi’s students,” she says and steps forward, very careful with her footing. If this is Sasuke—and he doesn’t deny it—then he’s far more practiced than she is. If she makes any mistakes, he’ll beat her, and she can’t risk that.

Behind her, Sora makes a small sound of sudden realization. She doesn’t blame him for taking longer; she only vaguely recalls seeing the framed photograph in Riku’s room, and Sora spent most of his time in Konoha focused on Riku himself, like a good friend.

Frankly, she deserves an award for placing name to face; Riku made a _lot_ of friends in Konoha, and Kairi certainly doesn’t remember them all. Sasuke and Sakura are special, though. Sasuke and Sakura were the reason Riku went on a super-secret undercover mission and _lost Kairi’s necklace_ , and then didn’t come back to the Islands for _months_ out of shame.

Kairi’s forgiven Riku for all that. She hasn’t forgiven the boy in front of her for _anything_.

Sasuke frowns at her. “Not anymore,” he says.

She nods in acknowledgment. “That’s right, you’re one of the ones who ran away.”

Sora may not remember the other reason why Sasuke’s special, but Kairi does: the whole reason Riku handed them the keyblade to begin with was that he knew he _could_ give it to someone else, he knew he could pass it to a friend and they would have their own. He warned them about the dream that Sora had because he knew that was part of having a keyblade, not just unique to him.

Riku knew that because he’d _given Sasuke the keyblade_ , and Kairi looks over the sword Sasuke has now, but she doesn’t think it is one.

“That’s right,” Sora says. “Him and…what was the girl’s name again?”

Kairi looks at Sasuke, raising her eyebrows. He stares back at her, a muscle in his jaw jumping slightly, his eyes searching her.

“How d’you two know this fella?” Goofy asks, and Kairi hears more than sees him move to protect her flank. If Sasuke attacks, he’ll be able to body flicker at her faster than Goofy can react, but she appreciates the sentiment.

“Riku told us about him,” Sora answers, and Kairi bites back a sigh.

Sasuke’s face—shifts. He doesn’t relax, but she thinks that answer releases some tension in him. His face smooths out that last little bit, into perfect blankness again.

“Ah,” he says. “Riku’s friends. From his home.” A pause, a flicker of realization. “On a different world.”

The only ninja who were supposed to know about that were the ones who escorted Riku on his visits to the Islands. The visits that began _after_ Sasuke left Konoha.

But they’re all here in Traverse Town; Kairi supposes it’s a moot point now. “Did Heartless get the ninja world?” she asks.

Sasuke’s presence is…telling. Worrying.

The way his expression spasms into actual emotion—too fast for Kairi to read beyond the fact that it’s more intense than the little tells of irritation he’s shown so far—is even worse. Sora sees it, too; he makes a small, broken noise.

Then Sasuke draws himself up and says, “That’s right,” with a sneer.

Kairi doesn’t think, just acts, lunges forward.

Spills onto her side on the ground, scraping her elbow, as Sasuke side-steps and kicks her knees out from under her.

Sora charges in with a yell, only to get batted into one of the pillars when Sasuke parries his attack. Kairi picks herself up.

Goofy wades in next, and his shield gives Sasuke pause for a moment before the boy dashes forward, hopping up and planting a foot on the shield when Goofy yanks it up to protect his face. Then Sasuke launches himself up, like Kairi and Sora each have tried—

And when he’s in the air and behind Goofy, he brings a hand up to his mouth and spits a fireball at Goofy’s back. Lands next to Donald. Raises his sword, brings it down.

Donald hits the wall, too close to the edge of the roof for comfort. Sora pushes himself away from the pillar, keyblade up in a defensive posture, and Kairi throws a Cure at Goofy as she grits her teeth and faces Sasuke, wishing for the knives she left back in her room on the Islands, wishing for more time spent learning jutsu, wishing for _Riku_.

At this point, she’d even take his sketchy uncle.

They have Sasuke surrounded, but Sasuke doesn’t look worried. To be fair, Kairi’s elbow bleeds sluggishly, Donald’s only barely picking himself up from where he hit the wall, all of them are either dusty or singed, and Sasuke’s entirely untouched.

That fireball was _not_ a Fire spell. Kairi’s eyes narrow. It’s one thing for Riku to _say_ that ninja his age know a lot more offensive techniques than he does and quite another thing to face the evidence in a fight.

Sasuke huffs. “This won’t take long,” he says, quietly, offhandedly, like he’s talking to himself. And then he flashes a Tiger seal—

And Kairi and Sora drop their keyblades, slamming their hands together with thumbs, index fingers, and middle fingers all pointed up, Tiger seals just as competent as his.

Donald and Goofy move in quarter-time, if that, while Sasuke lunges for his closer target first, his sword pulled back in preparation of a jab at Sora. Sora, however, _isn_ _’t_ moving at quarter-time; Jungle King flashes into his hand in a block followed by the best Blizzard Kairi’s seen him cast yet.

Sasuke ducks the spell, sucker-punches Sora, and whirls to block Kairi’s downward swing of Native Work—her own keyblade from Deep Jungle makes up for a lack of length in thickness, a trunk to Jungle King’s branch. The shaft has a pattern like moss, and at the end of it is a leopard’s paw, claws extended. It’s more axe than sword, and Kairi isn’t as deft with it as she’d like, but Sasuke isn’t about to give her enough time to swap keychains.

Kairi tries to rake those claws across Sasuke’s face now, with more than a little viciousness because he _sucker-punched Sora_ , but Sasuke brings his own sword up in a block and then _twists_ it so the flat of his blade catches where the paw meets the shaft of Kairi’s and yanks the blade out of her hand.

Then he punches her in the face.

 _Ow_.

He doesn’t break her nose—or anything else—but her eye aches and she can’t open it. While she staggers backward, trying to think around the sudden jolt of pain enough to cast Cure, Sasuke sweeps her legs out from under her and leaves her gasping on her back.

Then Donald’s Thunder spell lands, only Sasuke isn’t there anymore. Sora’s Cure hits Kairi before she can muster her own, and she pushes herself onto her elbows and then upright, eye now watering and itchy but functional.

Goofy’s shield sails overhead to land on the far side of the rooftop, either taken and tossed by Sasuke or thrown and missed by Goofy. Donald tries to dodge a second strike, but Sasuke’s body flicker lasts three times as long as Kairi’s best—none of them stand a chance.

Kairi pauses. The thought tastes like ash in her mouth, like bile. _They don_ _’t stand a chance_. Sasuke can move faster than Donald or Goofy; he can hit harder than Sora or Kairi. She doesn’t believe for a second that fireball jutsu is the only one he knows, and Riku didn’t share enough about Sasuke for them to have forewarning, let alone an advantage.

Still, Kairi takes Sora’s hand and lets him pull her up. They can’t just give up, and running isn’t an option.

Donald goes over the roof’s edge—not all the way to the ground, but down to the next level, which must be painful—the next time Sasuke knocks him away. Goofy lasts longer: Sasuke is fast enough to get past his shield, once Goofy retrieves it, but seems to forget about it a few times, looking just the tiniest bit surprised when his sword meets resistance.

Sora and Kairi, meanwhile, stay in the game by taking turns distracting Sasuke and casting Cure on each other. Sora gets knocked out once, when Sasuke jabs the pommel of his sword into the back of Sora’s neck. Sora’s eyes roll back and he collapses on the ground, gone still.

Kairi counts down seconds in her head as Sasuke advances on her— _eight, seven, six_ —and body flickers away from his strike, casting Cure while he lines up a fireball that only barely misses her face. Sora takes a few extra heart-stopping moments to jerk back up, but he does.

After another few go-rounds, Kairi starts to think maybe they _do_ have a chance: after all, Donald and Goofy are out, but every time Sasuke knocks her or Sora down, they manage to get each other back up.

Then, on the heels of that realization comes another, worse: it isn’t that they have a chance, but that Sasuke isn’t seriously trying to beat them.

Unlike all the Heartless they’ve fought so far, he has no weak points. Kairi’s dug her elbows into his guts a few times, landed the odd hit, but Sasuke still looks unfazed. His movements don’t falter in the slightest, no limp, no pause, just smooth steps and swings. The only jutsus he uses are body flicker and his fireball, and he’s landed on the wall or pillars a few times before launching himself at one or the other of them, but that’s it.

“What do you _want_?” Sora finally cries out, sliding his keyblade into a block to keep Sasuke from stabbing into Kairi’s gut.

Sasuke leans into their locked swords, then once again shifts his weight, uses it to disarm Sora. He doesn’t just hit Sora this time, though—he grabs Sora by the front of his shirt and bodily throws him halfway across the roof. When Kairi moves to stop him, or at least get a counter-hit in, Sasuke bends at the waist, dodging her blow and snapping back up with barehanded strikes to her shoulder, her gut, her chin when she doubles over.

Kairi topples down, lands on her butt with her head ringing and her vision wavering with vertigo, her keyblade next to her hand for all the good that does her.

Then Sasuke steps closer to Sora, and Kairi’s gaze sharpens painfully. His expression stays blank.

It isn’t any flavor of anger or desperation on his face when he raises his hand in Sora’s direction. Black-and-purple energy swirls around his hand.

“You’re in my way,” Sasuke says, and the fireball launches.

Kairi moves without thinking. Her hands flash into the Tiger seal even as she shoves herself onto her feet. For the first step, the second, the third, she thinks she’ll get to Sora in time to pull him out of the way of the fireball. As the distance between her and Sora shortens, however, she realizes: the fireball is almost as fast as she is, and it had a head-start.

She won’t make it in time.

She _tries_ , though. It’s _Sora_. He’s taken Fire spells before—those stupid flying Heartless are _terrible_ —but he’s sitting still, eyes wide. He’s never been hit in the _face_ with a Fire spell.

And Sora’s already hurt. And this isn’t a _spell_ , it’s _jutsu_. And Kairi remembers: all Riku’s stories end, “and then I spent a long time in the hospital, recovering,” because that’s what a jutsu _does_ to a person, it _hurts_ them.

This is the Ninja Problem, come back to hurt Sora _again_.

Kairi reaches out a hand, a dim thought of grabbing Sora overwhelmed by her need to shield him from the oncoming dark fire.

She makes it, just in time—not to grab Sora, not to push him out of the way, but to put herself _in_ the way—and has just long enough to raise her arm to shield her face, to flinch down to avoid the worst of the blast.

It rakes across her upper arm, her shoulder, the side of her head. She turns her head enough that her ear is only singed, but purple flames sweep past her scalp, skimming along the lower edge of her skull.

She screams. Her arm and shoulder don’t hurt, but her head does. Her head feels incandescent with pain. She can’t see past it, can’t think around it, can’t—she tries to pat it out, but her arm doesn’t move right, even though it doesn’t hurt.

Not even that it doesn’t hurt as bad as her head—her arm feels numb.

At some point, her knees hit the ground. She curls forward, inward, huddled and small and hurt, chest heaving. Tears pour down her face. Her throat scratches. She sucks in breaths around hiccups and sobs, and she doesn’t register anything.

⁂

Sora reaches out as Kairi collapses in front of him, but Sasuke’s indifferent, “I wouldn’t do that,” makes him pause, hand extended.

He glares at the boy, keyblade appearing at his call, and pushes to his feet. He steps between Kairi and Sasuke. “What did you _do_ to her?! You’ll pay for that!”

Sasuke snorts. “What I did is nothing compared to what she did to herself. Look at her. Already, the darkness is working through her.” He shakes his head. “I guess the witch wasn’t lying after all.”

Wary of a trap, Sora turns so that he can keep Sasuke in his peripheral _and_ look at Kairi.

Kairi’s hair is smoking a little, embers caught in a few strands that haven’t already burned away. A line of red skin runs from just behind her ear to the back of her skull. Her exposed shoulder and the upper arm beneath it are shiny and pink—with lines of black and purple threaded through them, pulsing and twisting, glowing.

Sora falls to his knees next to her, hands hovering over the area, unsure of how to help, certain he has to do _something_. Behind him, Sasuke snorts again.

“She used a jutsu against the darkness and paid the price,” he says. Sora’s head swivels to glare at him, tears welling up in his eyes, and he hates Sasuke: hates his indifferent tone, the smug, easy way he defeated them, his darkness and his fire, that he _hurt Kairi_ and he doesn’t even care. Sasuke just keeps going: “It will burrow its way into her chakra coils until there’s no part of her that’s free of it, and then it will consume her heart. She’ll be gone in hours, maybe days.” A pause, a shrug. “If she wakes up, you might get to say goodbye.”

Sora’s hands clench into fists above Kairi, and then he forces them open, forces a Cure spell out of them. It washes over Kairi, lifts a few scrapes and bruises from her. It doesn’t touch the burn on her head, let alone the one on her arm.

“That won’t work,” Sasuke says. “That wound was created by magic and darkness. Magic won’t heal it.”

“Will jutsu?” Sora hates to ask, hates to owe anything to Sasuke, even a dim hope, but if it helps Kairi—

“No. You’ll just join her in the darkness.” A pause, a huff that might be laughter. “Go ahead, if that’s what you want—throw your life away after hers. Maleficent will thank you for it.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

But Sasuke’s done talking. Sora turns to glare at him again and finds him gone.

⁂

By the time Donald brings Aerith (and the others) to the rooftop, it’s nearly too late.

Aerith can’t heal the darkness. She’s tried, and tried, and tried. She’s planted flowers throughout Traverse Town, in window-boxes and planters and cracks in the sidewalk; she’s fed them every scrap of healing magic and flicker of light she can call up. Leon and Yuffie have found her crumpled on the ground next to bits of greenery too often to keep track.

It works, up to a point. It pushes back the darkness. It’s never enough.

The darkness is no longer quite so obvious when Aerith kneels beside Kairi. Sora describes it between tears and hiccupping sobs, his hands sketching out helplessness as he stares at her like she might pull a star from the sky and use it to save his friend.

Aerith wishes she could. Maybe, on her own world, it would be possible. But different worlds have different magic, and Traverse Town is too near the Realm of Darkness for White Magic to be that powerful. All Aerith can do is her best, and it isn’t enough.

The only option, really, is to keep the darkness from spreading, and Aerith plants her magic at the borders of it and _pushes_.

Kairi opens beautifully for the magic, the healing, like a sunflower at daybreak.

It won’t be enough, but Aerith can try, and maybe buy them all enough time to pluck a miracle from the sky—for Kairi’s sake, for Sora’s sake, for the sake of all the worlds that need the keyblade wielders whole and strong and together.

She can try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we've seen the last major-ish character who had yet to be introduced. :D
> 
> Next chapter is set to come out in **two weeks** , on **February 29 or March 1**. See you all then!


	7. The End of Act 1: light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi makes connections; or, rather, Kairi meets some connections she already had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter posits some Theories about a few concepts that haven't been explored in canon _yet_ but may very well be in the future. Otherwise, no real warnings.

Kairi doesn’t awaken.

She knows she’s asleep, but it isn’t important. She reaches for—something—she hasn’t been able to grasp it yet—she can just brush it with her fingertips—

Kairi falls. Like the other Island kids, she learned how to swim young: Sora taught her, always smiling and helpful. He didn’t care that she was too old, that she learned too slowly. He told her about riptides with his baby face screwed up in concentration; he pointed out all the dangerous parts of the beach to her. He showed her how to move her arms and legs, how to hold her breath.

Riku taught her how to dive, with a fearless grin and sharp-eyed consideration for her landing.

She feels like the weightless moment between those lessons, suspended in the air, waiting to hit the water and pull herself up. She feels alone, without anyone to spot for her, without anyone to catch her or dive in after her.

Instead of plunging into water, though, she passes through the water into more air. She isn’t swimming, isn’t falling; she doesn’t crash.

Instead, she spins upwards, breath caught in her lungs. Still, and utterly alone.

Around her, the world lacks depth and detail, though it seems to stretch into infinity in all directions. It’s overbright, oversaturated; the sky above is interspersed clouds, the surface beneath her a clear, crystal blue. There are no shadows.

Only “beneath her” is very relative, because there isn’t much _her_.

Even for a dream, it’s…strange, to not have a body. She floats, weightless, bodiless, in an endless, peaceful expanse. Gravity can’t contain her, nothing holds her back, but she feels no desire to explore such a vast, empty space. She just bobs in the air.

Except she can’t even enjoy the peace; a sensation like a tug on her hand, her arm, light and tentative at first, then insistent.

Turning around is useless: she twirls in place, gazing out in all directions, but finds nothing. Nothing and no one. The loneliness is as vast as the space, as crushing.

Still: a tug, and when she stops fighting it, it drags her. She lets it, fearless and only distantly curious. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing except the sky, bright despite its clouds, and the water, still as glass. There’s nothing, so she might as well follow whatever pull or instinct this is.

As she’s led, she hears a faint voice, as if it’s calling from the empty horizon. She can’t make out words at first, just the urgent tone; as she follows the tugging, though, she starts to hear it more clearly.

“Oh, you can’t be lost. Come back, won’t you? You _must_ come back. We need you.”

She can’t place the voice for a long while. She certainly doesn’t _believe_ it. Who needs her? Her mother didn’t need yet another responsibility. Sora doesn’t need her butting into his fights and messing things up. Donald and Goofy have the key they need in Sora, so she’s just extra to them, too.

Leon and the others didn’t need another reminder of their lost home, that’s for sure.

And Riku might’ve needed her, but he’s… He doesn’t need her anymore.

As the voice becomes clearer, louder, more recognizable, the words make even less sense. That’s _Alice_ _’s_ voice, but since when does she need _Kairi_? Kairi couldn’t help her. Kairi didn’t even get close.

And still, Alice’s voice calls out to her, pleading with her to come back. It’s joined by other voices, unfamiliar voices, voices of women Kairi’s never met, who nevertheless say the same things.

“You have to come back. We need you.”

The voices gain strength and confidence, until they abruptly cut off, replaced by a squeaky sound accompanying a flickering light. The light lands in front of Kairi and flashes into a doll-like creature, with itty-bitty ears, dark, squinched eyes, and teeny-tiny arms and legs. Kairi wants to scoop it up and cuddle with it on her bed, only she has no bed to cuddle on, and no arms to scoop.

Its face is impossible to read, but as it jerks back and wheels its arms in a huge production to regain its balance, Kairi figures it’s surprised. And overdramatic.

“Hello,” she says, since she might as well be polite. “I think I’m lost. Can you help me?”

Of course, since she’s dreaming, her straightforward question goes ignored. (Since she’s dreaming, she doesn’t worry about being able to talk without a throat or a tongue; dreams work on their own logic, and she can hear her own voice just fine.)

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” the creature says. “How did you get here?”

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t I be here?”

The creature leans forward, as if to examine her closely. “Because you aren’t _dead_. You must be asleep, but most people can cross back over on their own before they get lost in _this_ world.”

Well, _that_ sounds promising. “If you can tell me how to cross back over,” Kairi says, “I would be happy to.”

“Hmm.” The creature circles her, examines her. Kairi’s form is small enough that she can’t precisely look at herself. She _feels_ like a pocket of air, a bit of wind blowing around, but the creature can see her well enough, so she must have _some_ substance.

“Oh, _that_ _’s_ what happened,” it says at last. “You have a heart of pure light, but the darkness has gotten into your body, so your heart can’t return to it for now. You must not have had anywhere else to go, so you came here.”

That all sounds mildly horrifying. Kairi can’t pick it _all_ apart, so she decides to focus. Prioritize. “The darkness got _into my body_?” she asks, appalled.

The creature nods. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Your heart is still tethered to your body. Other hearts of light are keeping it connected, and since _your_ heart is pure light, that tether must be pushing back the darkness. Once your body is safe to return to, I’m sure you’ll go right back.”

Kairi would narrow her eyes if she had them. “How much of that is you guessing?”

“Not very much,” the creature says cheerfully. “I’ve seen this before. It will take some time for your heart to settle, but you’ll be back. That tether is very powerful.” The creature somehow looks wistful despite not having a very expressive face: its body language, its hesitantly upraised hand, communicate all its emotions. “All the hearts connected to yours, and all the hearts connected to _theirs_ , will lead you back home.”

—Sora. That must mean Sora. Sora, and all the friends he’s made on their journey. Leon, Cid, Aerith, and Yuffie. Donald and Goofy. Maybe even the Cheshire Cat. Tarzan and Jane, the gorillas. Phil. Cloud. The hero, Hercules. Even those puppies he found, the dog parents, the man who stands outside Cid’s shop who Sora greets relentlessly.

Sora, and all the friends he’s made. Meanwhile, Kairi’s made, what, three friends? Donald, Goofy, Alice. Seven, if you count the Traverse Town group, who mostly just feel sorry for her.

(But it’s so much easier to not lose anything you care about if you just care about _fewer things_. Fewer people. Fewer friends.)

“Is there a way to follow the tether back and get home sooner?” she asks, because part of her wants to stay here and let everything resolve itself, but the rest of her is worried about Sora.

It’s a dream, of course, but she doesn’t want to dream herself waking up too late to save him. Even if it wasn’t real, that would be awful. (Too close, far too close, to what happened with Riku, and that thought is a kernel of rage and despair she buries deep inside whatever’s left of her here.)

The creature tips its head to one side, then sighs. “It won’t be safe, but if you’re willing to risk it, you can try. If you don’t make it, though, you’ll be lost in the Realm of Sleep—and who knows how long you’ll drift there, unable to awaken.”

“Sora will come find me,” Kairi says, without pause, without concern. “But I’d rather not make him wait. How do I do it?”

“Well,” and now the creature sounds doubtful, “it’ll be a little tricky, but you are a keyblade wielder, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Without a hand, she can’t summon her keyblade—but at the thought, it shimmers into existence in front of her, floating. Destiny’s Embrace, her first keyblade.

The creature nods. “Right. You’ll need to concentrate on the hearts connected to yours. If you can feel that connection, you should be able to pull yourself closer to them.”

“Should?”

The creature’s eyes narrow, its hands on its hips defensively. “I don’t have _all_ the answers, you know. That should work. Whether it does or not is up to you.”

Privately, Kairi thinks the creature is guessing a lot more than it wants to let on, but it isn’t like she has any better options. Stay here, in an endless, calm expanse, or try to go to Sora? There’s only one way forward.

Her keyblade pivots suddenly, as if locking on to something. It _feels_ ready. Kairi looks at the creature one last time and says, “Thank you. Do you have a name?” It feels rude to ask now, at the end of their meeting, but better late than never.

“Chirithy,” it tells her. “And you?”

“Kairi. It was wonderful to meet you, Chirithy.”

“Yes. Try not to come back here too soon.”

“I won’t.” Reaching out to the keyblade is more a feeling than an action, without an arm or a hand, but as she moves closer to it, it feels like she slides into it—almost like settling into a boat.

A golden trail shimmers into existence before her, looping and meandering. With barely a thought, her keyblade moves in the direction of that trail, following it through its many twists and turns.

After a few minutes, it spirals up, up, up…and then plunges straight down, through the water. Kairi screams, half in exhilaration and half in fear, but the keyblade shatters the surface of the water and goes through it, into the watery darkness she first crossed through before she reached Chirithy’s world. She feels like she’s dragged through a cresting wave, and then she’s _through_ , and she can breathe again.

In the distance, she can see an intricate spider’s web of golden thread crisscrossing between huge pillars in the distance, only barely visible amidst dark fog.

And her body is back. She hangs in the air for a moment before slowly drifting downward, a pool of brightly colored light shimmering into existence beneath her feet and then spilling forward in a narrow, winding path. It feels firm, stable, for all that it’s barely as wide as she is. Her clothes and her hair aren’t wet, and her head doesn’t hurt anymore.

When she looks herself over, she looks fine, without any scrapes or bruises from battle. Her free hand pats her head, but that seems fine, too.

Before her, the gold shimmers, reminding her that she needs to get back to her friends.

Kairi holds her keyblade in front of her. “Can you help me?” she asks, not sure if she just means _pick a direction to go in_ or _get back home_.

In any case, Destiny’s Embrace starts to glow, and several of the golden threads glow brightly in response.

“Thanks!” There’s still the problem of _getting_ to the threads, but Kairi carefully makes her way to the nearest one. The path winds inconveniently, taking her just out of reach before curving away from the thread, then looping back.

Frustrated, Kairi surveys the area, hands planted on her hips. She can’t see a single place where the path will lead her close enough to touch the glowing thread.

Well then.

Kairi backs up along the path. It won’t be a perfect, straight leap, but she ought to be able to get something of a running start. If she reaches out, she should be able to catch the thread.

And if she falls… Well, Chirithy warned her about getting lost in the Realm of Sleep.

Deep breath. Shake the tension loose, then position herself. She isn’t just the little girl who ran through hallways alone and searching; she isn’t just the little girl who watched the boys race and cheered them on. She can do this.

She takes the run a little faster, a little more reckless than she ought to; her foot fumbles on the edge of the pathway, lowering her trajectory far, far out of range of the thread—

Which moves and catches her firmly around her midsection. Before she can more than gasp, she’s drawn into a memory.

⁂

“Hey, you’re the new girl, right?”

Kairi pauses, foot hanging in midair where she was about to stick it in the tide pool. “Yes? Who’s asking?”

The boy who hops down from the higher rocks is taller than the other boy who’s started showing up at her house. _Sora_ , he’d said his name was—and this morning, he came by again to talk her ear off before he left, saying he had to go to school. She’d barely got a word in.

Mom says she’s just shy, and not to worry about it. Kairi doesn’t _feel_ shy. She pulls her foot back and balls her hands into fists. She’ll _prove_ it with this boy.

He looks her up and down, so she returns the favor: there’s a bruise on his cheek, and his knuckles look scratched. The knees of his shorts are dirty. His shoes look all scuffed up. His hair, short and silver, is in mild disarray, like he’s tried to smooth it down without complete success. A few leaves are caught in it.

“Riku,” he says, extending a hand. His knuckles are bloody.

Kairi takes his hand and gives it a firm shake. “Kairi.” She hesitates, but: she isn’t shy. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Riku withdraws his hand and tucks both of his into his pockets. “Teacher sent me home.” Kairi doesn’t ask why. “Sora won’t shut up about you. When are you going to start coming to class?”

So Riku is friends with Sora. Kairi isn’t surprised Sora mentioned her, though she can’t imagine he had much to say. “Mom said she wants me to ‘settle in’ first.” Mom used a few bigger words, too, but Kairi doesn’t remember them.

Riku makes a rude noise. “You look settled to me.” He doesn’t make an issue of it, though, just moves on, nods to the tide pool. “You shouldn’t step in those. There’s fish and sharp stuff in them. You want to climb some trees instead?”

She’d _wanted_ to feel one of the colorful fish she could see darting around in the water with her toes, but if there’s sharp things… Not worth it. She shoves her feet back into her shoes, warm from sitting on the rock in full sunlight.

“Let’s go,” she says, and Riku grins.

⁂

Kairi _can_ _’t_. She barely registers that she’s back on the pathway somehow as she curls up, wet face pressed into her elbows. She doesn’t keep track for how long. Only the twinge of her hand protesting holding her keyblade too tightly for too long pulls her out of it, and she wipes her face on her shirt before she straightens.

Not that one. If Riku’s safe—wonderful. But if he _isn_ _’t_ …

Kairi can’t leave Sora alone to rescue them _both_. Even if they’re together. Especially if they’re together. That isn’t fair to Sora.

“I asked for _help_ ,” she tells her keyblade, betrayed; Destiny’s Embrace shows no sign of listening to her or caring. It just continues to glow, along with six other threads in the distance.

Kairi sighs. This is what she gets for asking a _weapon_ for help. One of those glowing lines could be Sora. She won’t know until she checks.

As she surveys the lines, though, she realizes she isn’t where she jumped from—she can see that pathway, back several yards and somehow lower than her current vantage point.

For now, she’s standing in a wide pool of light, almost big enough for her to lie down and spread her arms and legs out. It still isn’t anywhere as big as those pillars in the distance.

She explores the edges of it tentatively, and on two sides, at roughly three and eight o’clock, paths spring up underneath her inched-out sneaker.

Either will take her close-but-not-close-enough to another glowing thread. Both are the same width as the other path. Kairi sighs and holds Destiny’s Embrace out in front of her.

“A clue would be nice,” she tells it.

It gives her nothing. She sighs.

“It was worth a shot. To the right it is.”

The path twists and turns, slopes up and down; a few times, she has to catch herself to keep from wobbling over the edge.

So, so slow. What’s Sora doing while she’s wasting all this time? Riku would have leapt and dashed along the lit path without any concern he might fall; even Sora himself wouldn’t be as nervous as she is, pausing to catch her breath and calm her heartbeat after each near-tumble.

When she makes it to the nearest jumping-off point she can find, she breathes deliberately, calms, and then sprints for the edge of the pathway. As she reaches it, she leaps, extends her arm to catch the thread—

Her fingers are about to come up short, she _knows_ they are, she can see that she won’t quite make it, when the line suddenly jerks toward her, catching against her palm. Her hand closes reflexively around it.

Kairi isn’t in a memory. She isn’t in the shadowy world full of golden threads. She isn’t in Chirithy’s world, either. All around her is total light, blindingly bright to look at.

“Hello?” she calls. “Hello, is anyone here?”

The thread belongs to a person, so someone _should_ be here, but she doesn’t get an answer. Instead, as she squints, the light around her takes on an overhead-projector quality, broadcasting images all around her.

Slowly, in fits and starts, the images darken from nearly invisible to sepia. As they do, Kairi recognizes a room here, a person there. It’s Wonderland, only not as she saw it.

She realizes why when, slowest of all, Alice materializes.

Alone among the white and sepia, Alice looks vibrant, from her yellow hair to the blue of her dress to her shiny black shoes. Her eyes closed, her hands clasped in front of her, she could be a doll for how still she is.

Kairi steps closer to her, but nothing happens until the two girls are less than a foot apart. Kairi reaches forward to take Alice’s hands in her own, and a light shines out between them, warmer than the light all around them.

“There you are,” she hears Alice’s voice say, though Alice’s mouth doesn’t move. “I knew you could make it back.”

“I don’t think I have,” Kairi says, examining her. The hand in hers is warm, the pulse at the girl’s wrist slow but present. “I’m lost.”

“There’s lost and then there’s _lost_ , and you may be one, but you certainly aren’t the other,” Alice says. “And now I sound like the Cat. It doesn’t matter. You’ll find your way home. I believe in you.”

“We barely met. Why would you believe in me?”

“Sometimes, you don’t have to know someone very long to _know_ them. I know you, Kairi. And I know you’ll be alright.”

“That makes one of us.”

A giggle, especially strange to hear when the girl’s face is so placid. “I can give you something that might help.”

Kairi’s hand around Alice’s grows warm. She lets go in surprise; Alice’s hand returns to its original position, and a small light sits in the palm of Kairi’s, only to fade as she looks at it.

“When your enemies are too big,” Alice says, “you’ll be able to bring them down to your size.”

“Thank you,” Kairi says, clenching and unclenching her fist. It doesn’t feel any different, but—she believes Alice. “Can you tell me—are you alright?”

Alice hums and says, “I’m not _not_ alright, for now. That’s all I can say, though. I’m afraid I don’t know any more.”

“It’s more than I knew before.” It sounds like she wasn’t turned into a Heartless, at least. Then, after a quick glance around, “Do you know how I can leave?”

“I’d say you should go the way you came, but the Cat would scold me for that, I think. Isn’t there a door? It feels like there ought to be a door, somewhere, for you to walk through. Doors are traditional.”

As she says all that, one materializes—from out of the sepia, the door with the giant doorknob glimmers into full color between one breath and the next.

“There is,” Kairi says. “Alright, I’m going. I’ll try to get you back home soon, okay?”

“Don’t rush,” Alice tells her as she opens and steps through the door.

On the other side is a long drop down, with hands reaching out to grab at her from the walls. When she lands, it’s in the kitchen in Wonderland—where Donald taught Kairi Fire and the Cheshire Cat taught her Blizzard only days ago.

It feels so much longer.

The room is empty—no Cat, no Alice, no Heartless. Kairi approaches the doorknob, which looks to be sleeping without snoring for once. It doesn’t complain, either, when she tugs on it, merely lets her open the door.

Behind that door is a new section of fog-filled void, still lit by the golden web and the other pathways in the distance. A new pool of light materializes just on the other side of the door.

Kairi braces herself and steps out. The door disappears behind her as soon as she’s through.

The web of golden thread looks different; the pillars seem larger and closer. Whatever that door was, she’s moved away from where she was. The fog is still there, but it looks diminished.

Five of the threads before her gleam like Riku’s and Alice’s.

She makes her way to the nearest one, tripping a few times, but without any major near-disasters. She reaches it in less time than it took her to reach Alice’s, and this time, she’s _extra_ careful when she makes the leap, catching hold of the golden thread with both hands. She swings on it back and forth once, twice, and then another bright, white space pulls her in.

Waiting for the images to play out feels like a waste of time, but she has nothing better to do, no better options to get through this world. She doesn’t even know if the pathways themselves _can_ take her anywhere besides to more threads: the threads seem to be people she’s connected to, and Chirithy made it sound like she needed to use those connections to get back. For all she knows, she could be doing everything wrong, though.

She’s doing the best she can.

When the images resolve enough to be intelligible, Kairi frowns. She doesn’t recognize a single thing in any of them. Oh, sure, there’s a castle, she’s seen castles before—but this isn’t one she recognizes. There’s a hidden staircase (neat!), a hidden room (cool!), a strange wooden contraption (potentially interesting?), and then—

And then a young woman, maybe Aerith’s age, in a beautiful blue gown, with gold hair tumbling down her back and a gold crown on top of her head. Her eyes, just like Alice’s, are closed, expression peaceful, hands clasped.

Kairi wastes no time in walking over to her and taking both her hands. Those hands are cold as ice, but the voice she hears is warm.

“Hello, little sister. I’m glad you could find us.” Just like Alice, her face doesn’t move.

“Hello.” Kairi hesitates, wanting to tell the woman she wasn’t _looking_ for her before she squashes that impulse. It would be rude. “I don’t think I have a sister, though.”

Definitely not one who looks like _this_ lady, all tall and golden.

A pretty, twinkling laugh. “Then I’ll call you something else. What would you like? It doesn’t have to be your name.”

“Kairi. That _is_ my name, though.” Rinoa used to call her Kay, sometimes, but that’s the only nickname Kairi’s ever had. “What should I call you?”

“Briar Rose,” the lady answers without hesitation. “Though others call me Aurora, I was raised as Rose.”

“Rose, then,” Kairi says. “I’m looking for my way home, but once I’m back, I’ll come for you and get you out of wherever you are.”

Since she met Alice in the same situation as Rose, she’s fairly sure she’ll be able to rescue them both at the same time.

Rose sounds happy when she says, “A noble promise. Let me give you something that will help you on your journey, then. When others seek to do you harm, they shall be unable to do so. The effect will not last, but for a time, they shall find themselves fighting for you, or else asleep at your feet.”

Another light rests in Kairi’s palm as she lets go of one of Rose’s hands to look at it. It might be her imagination, but the hand she still holds feels warmer now.

“Thanks.”

Another laugh. “When next we meet, I will be the one thanking you. Go now, Kairi, and find your way home. Know that we believe in you.”

This time, the fireplace jolts into color, the secret passage starkly visible in the bright space around it. Kairi lets go of Rose and makes her way into it, ducking her head to not bang it against the stonework.

She follows the winding staircase down, down, down, until it reaches the bottom, where another door greets her.

Once more, Kairi finds herself in familiar surroundings. She sighs and sets off again.

Four more times she takes hold of the golden threads.

The next takes her to images of another castle, and another blonde woman, this one in a white dress. She calls herself Ella, and when she gives Kairi a power to help her, she says, “I hope it will help you as much as it helped others in the past,” but when Kairi tries to ask who she means, Ella just tells her that she needs to return home quickly. “Trust me, you don’t want to leave too late. Especially a world like this one is now—if you don’t leave soon, you won’t be able to.”

Kairi slides down a long, curved banister, and the massive doors just beyond the foot of the stairs take her away from that world.

The fifth thread belongs to a girl named Snow White, who also mentions that her power has helped others before Kairi. She, too, refuses to explain what she means. “When you fall asleep for too long,” she says, “the people closest to you grieve. You need to return to your friends, Kairi.”

The sixth thread is Belle’s, and she, at least, isn’t cryptic. “I can’t tell you much,” she says, “but I’m certain the Beast is looking for me. If you see him, will you tell him I’m alright?”

“Of course,” Kairi promises.

“Then take this, for your trouble. I can’t give you everything I’ve read, but in a pinch, your power will know what to do. It’s a little unpredictable, I’m afraid, but it _will_ be useful.”

By the time Kairi searches out the last gleaming thread, she’s almost to the giant pillars, which she can now see have flat tops. Unlike the other women’s, the last thread doesn’t take her to a white room; unlike Riku’s, Kairi doesn’t find herself in a memory.

Instead, she’s on a balcony, the night sky dark and littered with stars above her. A young woman leans against the railing, staring up. Below them sprawl darkened gardens, closed off by a high wall (though not nearly so high as Konoha’s), and beyond that, a whole city, dotted with lights.

Kairi blinks, drinking in the colors. Even in the flickering torchlight, it’s lush.

“Hello,” she says, after the silence grows awkward.

The woman turns and looks at her. She’s _awake_ and _smiling_. Her eyes are wide, alert, dark, _beautiful_. Kairi smiles back.

“Hello,” the woman says. “You’re not from around here. How did you get in?”

Kairi shrugs. “I think I followed your heart?”

The woman looks confused—well, it isn’t like Kairi has a _good_ answer for her.

“Never mind. My name’s Kairi. Nice to meet you.”

The woman shakes her hand. “Jasmine. I don’t meet many new people, but… For some reason, it feels like we’ve met before.”

Kairi rocks back on her heels a little, hands clasped behind her back. “I think I get that. Like, we just met, but we’re already friends?”

“Yes! That’s it exactly.” Jasmine laughs. “Maybe it’s just because you’re a girl. I don’t get to talk to many girls.”

She looks sad at that, so Kairi reaches for her hand again and squeezes it. “Well, we’re talking now, and we _are_ friends, so there.”

If Sora feels so—so—light, and happy, every time he saves a world, no _wonder_ he wants to do it all the time. Kairi would go fight a _dragon_ for Jasmine if it would make the other girl look so pleased, so touched.

“We are friends,” Jasmine confirms. “I think—no, I _know_ —that our hearts are connected. And I think you’re far from home, yes?”

“Yes.” Kairi bites her lip to keep from saying anything else.

Jasmine squeezes her hand. “Well then, if there’s anything I can do to help you get back, tell me and I’ll do it.”

There’s the same light that Kairi’s seen five previous times, but never has that light been accompanied by a roar from the other room.

Jasmine laughs. “And Rajah will help as well!”

A—a _huge cat_ , like the leopard in the Deep Jungle with different coloring, stalks out onto the balcony. It walks right up to Kairi and plops down, lifts one paw, and spreads its claws wide, licking in between them.

“Rajah is fabulous as backup,” Jasmine says, looking at the cat with love and affection all over her face, all through her voice. “He’s very protective of those he cares about, and he won’t let anyone sneak up on you while he’s around.”

Kairi hesitantly lets go of Jasmine’s hand to extend hers to Rajah, who ignores it for a long moment before eyeing it. At first, Kairi thinks that’ll be it, but then Rajah leans forward and butts his head into her outstretched hand, letting it run over one of his ears before he pulls back and begins grooming his other front paw.

“See, he likes you,” Jasmine says, giggling.

Kairi playfully scowls at Jasmine, who just laughs harder, and harrumphs. “Well. I like him too.”

Rajah rumbles. It isn’t quite a purr, but close enough.

“I’m glad.” Jasmine looks at them both with clear fondness, even as she sobers. “But I think you should head home soon. If the guards catch you here…”

“They won’t,” Kairi says with surety. “But I do need to get going.” Then she pauses, takes Jasmine’s hands in hers once more. “This friendship goes both ways. If _you_ ever need _me_ , I’ll be there. Friends look out for one another, okay? And I _always_ protect my friends.” When she can. She has so few friends as it is; she doesn’t want to lose one more.

There’s a second light, and this time, Jasmine tips her head to glance at their hands curiously, though she dismisses it quickly. She smiles at Kairi, squeezes her hands. “Of course.”

And then she shows Kairi where a small, athletic girl can shimmy down the side of the wall, into the dark gardens below, and tells her about the tree that grows right next to the wall on the far side of the gardens.

When Kairi pulls herself up onto the wall, instead of a city laid out before her, she can see all the lit paths she’s taken, all the little circles of light where she skipped from one world to another. The last one is just beneath her now. As she slips down from the wall, the wall and Jasmine’s world shimmer into darkness behind her.

The path that forms from this circle takes her straight to one of the pillars, with no twists, no turns, no slopes, no dips. When she reaches the top of the pillar, she can see that there’s a design in stained glass, but unlike all her paths so far, this one doesn’t light up beneath her.

Instead, a clear, confident, feminine voice—one she hasn’t heard yet today—tells her, _You aren’t yet ready to choose._

Kairi wants to argue with her—wants to tell this voice that she _is_ ready to make her choice, she’s _been ready_ —but before she can, a heaviness settles over her. She blinks, tries to push it away, but when she steps forward, she stumbles, lands on her hands and knees, and from there, collapses forward.

Kairi’s eyes fall shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will hopefully be up the weekend of **March 14-15** , although I may wind up having to scrap a good chunk of my 5 chapter buffer zone, so. sigh. I'm shooting for two weeks for now, though!
> 
> As always, a huge thank you to everyone who comments and leaves kudos; and also, to all my silent readers out there, I'm glad you've enjoyed the story so far. I hope you all continue to enjoy the story!


	8. Traverse Town & Disney Castle/Yen Sid's Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sora deals with the fallout of the fight with Sasuke, and Riku and Tenten leave Disney Castle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** negative self-talk and skewed thinking. This is not a happy fun chapter for the boys, especially Riku. :( Quick note: I've added the Unreliable Narrator tag.

Sora does not feel _great_ about his decisions lately. The last day and half have been especially rough.

Leon corners him after Aerith, Merlin, and the Fairy Godmother all descend on Kairi’s unconscious form like—well, like the adults descended on _Sora_ when his arm broke. Everyone unnecessary to healing Kairi is summarily kicked out. Even Donald is only allowed to stay on narrow-eyed sufferance.

Kairi looks so _small_ on the bed in the little house the others furnished and decorated just for them. It doesn’t occur to Sora that they’d made the beds big enough for snuggling with friends until Kairi’s in one alone, her face pale as moonlight, her head and shoulder all wrapped tight with bandages.

(He hears Aerith and Merlin and the Fairy Godmother start discussing, in hushed voices, _minimizing scar damage_ , but he can’t imagine it. He has a scar where Riku broke his arm, of course, but it’s not that big and he forgets about it a lot.

Kairi’s _head_ is burned, and her shoulder, halfway down to her elbow. That’s. That’s too much to ignore or forget about. Isn’t it?

He can pretend it isn’t, for her sake. He can. He _will_.)

Goofy and Yuffie tear off to track down any leads they can find on Sasuke, but Leon places a warning hand on Sora’s shoulder when he makes to follow them. “You and I need to talk,” he says, and all but drags Sora to his cavern.

There, he grills Sora for every minuscule detail about the encounter with Sasuke, making Sora repeat the events over and over and _over_. He makes Sora act out what he can remember of the fight—which isn’t much, since Sora was running on adrenaline and not much else for more than half of it.

Then Leon groans and buries his face in his hand. “This is why the keyblade doesn’t belong in the hands of children.”

“Hey, what’s _that_ supposed to mean?!”

When Leon meets Sora’s eyes, Sora takes an involuntary step backward. Leon’s expression is _fierce_ , his mouth set in a grim line, his eyes narrowed, brows furrowed.

“It _means_ ,” he says, no louder than he ever speaks, but voice tight with emotion like Sora’s never heard it before, “that you two nearly threw _everything_ away, for _nothing_. There was no reason to have that fight. He didn’t attack you; even if he had, you had every opportunity to leave. He wasn’t threatening the world. He _destroyed_ the Heartless.”

“With darkness!” Sora points out, incensed that Leon—who _wasn’t there_ , thank you very much!—thinks he and Kairi messed up so badly.

Well. Kairi’s hurt, so obviously they messed up. But it’s not as bad as Leon’s making it out!

“Which you should have come and _told us about_ , instead of staying there to fight him.” Leon’s hand cuts through the air in a sharp gesture, stopping Sora’s next retort. “If Donald hadn’t come to get us, if we’d arrived even _minutes_ later, you and Kairi would _both_ have been lost on that rooftop. You two have the _only_ keyblades in _all the worlds_ , do you understand that? Do you understand what a _responsibility_ that is?”

Without letting Sora answer, he goes on: “You two are the _only_ ones who can successfully fight the Heartless. You two are the _only_ hope our worlds have to fight them back. You two are the only hope we have to _ever_ see our home again, and you decided to throw that away to attack some boy because he said something Kairi didn’t like? Do you understand how _selfish_ that was? How short-sighted and _dangerous_ it was?”

Sora’s eyes water without his permission. His throat locks and his chin trembles and his fists shake at his sides. “It wasn’t _like_ that. He was talking about Riku being—Riku—”

“Your friend is _gone_ , Sora,” Leon tells him. “He has been, and if you two didn’t realize that days ago, I don’t know what to tell you. The only way you’ll get him back lies with the King, and you can’t do that if both of you are lost to the darkness.”

Sora breaks. He tips his chin down so he at least doesn’t have to look at Leon, doesn’t have to see the man watch him cry. Doesn’t have to see that Leon doesn’t care.

He could leave, but it feels like he isn’t allowed to until Leon gives him permission—like Leon will, somehow, think even _less_ of him if he turns his back on this conversation.

So, he stands around and cries, and Leon goes on, remorseless: “Kairi made a bad call, and that’s on her. But you backed her up, and that’s on _you_. If she dies, or if she can never use the keyblade again…” Leon doesn’t have to finish the thought.

He hadn’t—Kairi won’t really _die_ , will she? That’s why Aerith and the others are all together, so that she won’t! She’ll get better; they’ll make sure of it.

And not be able to use the keyblade? Would that mean she couldn’t come with him anymore? Would she have to stay here, with Leon, who will of course tell her it’s her own fault for rushing into battle without thinking things through, because Leon is Mr. Perfect and never lets himself get angry—

“That’s not _fair_ ,” Sora says. He can’t wipe the tears away quickly enough and his voice cracks on the last word, but he glares at Leon through it all. “We didn’t know! It’s not like we _meant_ to get hurt. We’ve been attacking the Heartless and the darkness, and everyone told us we were supposed to! And I _was_ about to heal her—if you guys hadn’t shown up, Kairi wouldn’t be any _worse_.”

“You don’t—” Leon starts, but Sora’s done listening.

“No, _you_ don’t know what it’s like!” It’s Sora’s turn to gesture, slashing a hand through the air. “The keyblade didn’t pick you, it picked _us_! And maybe we’re making mistakes, but we’re _trying_. We’re doing the best we can! And it’s hard! We’re saving all these people, but we can’t get to them quick enough, and we didn’t—Riku isn’t—you don’t know what it’s _like_.” Anger drains out of him slowly, as he stares into Leon’s still-grim expression.

The man doesn’t even look mad at Sora’s outburst, just—tired.

Sora’s shoulders shake. Tears well back up, when he thought he didn’t have any more. “I’m doing the best I can,” he tells Leon, hunching in on himself until he isn’t standing anymore, he’s curled up around his knees and crying into them, while Leon sighs over him and sinks down, back to back with Sora.

Leon’s back is strong and warm, and it doesn’t shift even a little when Sora leans into him.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admits, finally, quietly.

“I know,” Leon says. “You’ll figure it out.”

It might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to him.

⁂

If this Yen Sid guy can’t fix Riku, Tenten doesn’t know _what_ she’ll do, but it won’t be pretty.

Riku is listless most of the next day. She runs him through morning exercises, even gets him back down to the garden and runs the perimeter with him, but his gaze is distant and his responses to all her questions and comments are half-hearted, noncommittal at best and grunts at worst.

He isn’t crying. She’s not sure that’s an improvement.

Teasing gets her nothing; poking and prodding move him along, but the most reaction he’ll give is a weak swat and a sidestep. He doesn’t even _glare_. She’d hoped sleep would help, but instead, he’s worse than yesterday.

Minnie-sama and Daisy-san notice; they begin directing their conversation at Tenten, through the filter of Riku’s translation. He pays enough attention for that, at least, but he ventures no opinions and proposes no solutions, just shrugs when called upon to respond.

“Riku, you’re worrying me,” Tenten tells him, in the safety of their room. A child-sized rabbit brings them lunch—bowls of thick red soup and sandwiches with melted cheese. Riku eats his mechanically, eyes locked on the window.

He blinks, refocuses on her. His brow creases. “Sorry.”

She wants to say, _Don’t be sorry, just knock it off_. Or, _I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me_. Or, _I can’t fight whatever you’re fighting in your head, but I can help_.

Instead, she says, “Think looking at the ship will help?”

He shrugs, but his expression is at least thoughtful, not blank. A true maybe, then, not an _I don’t care_.

“Let’s try it and see, then,” she says, with as much cheer as she can muster under the circumstances.

The engineering room turns out to be the domain of two hyperactive chipmunks, Chip-kun and Dale-kun. Tenten feels an immediate kinship with them as soon as she sees their workshop: these are not _her people_ , precisely, but they’re related to the blacksmiths she’s spent a good part of her free time with.

Then she sees their blueprints (meticulous, with tons of notes along the margins that don’t get in the way of any of the important diagrams or labels) and reconsiders: Chip-kun and Dale-kun _are_ her people.

Riku looks less distracted, too, maybe picking up on some of her excitement. Or maybe he has to be less distracted, because at first, Chip-kun and Dale-kun are distracted enough for all of them. The two are focused, to the exclusion of everything else, on their console, which shows a readout on one monitor and a highly detailed, fast-moving view on the other.

The solution is as simple as squinting at the diagrams and asking a few pointed questions, trying to make the weird squiggles resolve into sense. If she thinks of them not as a written language but as foreign seals she needs to decipher, it’s easier to spot the repeated patterns. When they spot her interest, Chip-kun and Dale-kun move away from the console and crowd her, chittering too quickly for Riku to translate.

Tenten learns the words _gummi block_ right away and picks up on the distinct types nearly as fast.

There are no weapon gummis. That’s a problem. Chip-kun and Dale-kun have plenty Protect-G and Aerora-G, which Riku barely needs to translate as the two chipmunks enthusiastically pull out and demonstrate, with their whole little bodies, the effects of each.

They only have a basic cockpit and engine, which the chipmunks have to explain to _both_ Tenten and Riku—despite his familiarity with ships.

Riku flat-out denies these gummi ships are ships at all, with the most emotion he’s displayed all day. At first, she thinks he’s irritated, until he says with awe, “That’s a _rocket_.”

Not mad, then.

Chip-kun and Dale-kun offer to equip their gummi rocket with Haste-G. Riku listens to their explanation of its function with more attention than he’s paid to anything all day, then describes to Tenten as, “ _shunshin_ for the rocket, basically.”

Riku is the closest to an expert in _shunshin_ as Konoha’s gotten since Uchiha Shisui, so Tenten will take his word for it.

“That should make it easier to not get hit,” she says, and Riku nods.

The chipmunks point out a dish-shaped gummi that will alert them to incoming enemies, but “ _only_ ones coming from this direction.”

“Any chance we could get a second one of those?” Tenten asks, and Riku passes along the question, only to grimace at the answer. “Ah well. Can you tell them to point it at the back, then? We’ll just have to stay alert and watch the front.”

The chipmunks do as they’re asked, but Dale-kun tells Riku (who dutifully passes the message along to Tenten, mouth twisting in a weak attempt at a smile): “Heartless can attack from all directions, including above and below!”

“That’s not terrifying at all,” Tenten says, grinning back. “Can we ram into them?” She mimes it with her hands so they don’t have to wait for Riku to translate.

Dale-kun and Chip-kun do _not_ like that idea, judging by their panicky squeaks and the way they both skitter up to her. They each claim a shoulder and start yelling, and Tenten can’t understand a word but Riku’s _laughing_ at her, them, the whole situation.

Worth it.

⁂

Riku has no illusions about who’s driving the rocket. Tenten asks the chipmunks to put the two seats next to each other in the front, but one has the steering controls and it isn’t Riku’s.

On the other hand, Riku gets the map display. He _wishes_ ships on the Islands came with this; it even shows him where they are in relation to Disney Castle. It’s about a thousand times easier to read and interpret than a star chart, especially since Sora would always—

Riku swallows, banishes the thought. Not now, not now, not now. Get to Yen Sid first, fix the keyblade problem, give Tenten the keyblade, and _then_ break down.

(He has the bracelet Sora gave him, and of course Kairi’s necklace. All he needs is a couple hunks of wood, some running water. He doesn’t have anything of his mother’s, of Kakashi’s, of Gai’s, but he can send his friends off to Leviathan, at least. Just in case he can’t… Just in case.)

The map also shows any Heartless the scanner picks up on. Riku keeps his attention on it; his job is to warn Tenten, so she can dodge or outrun their enemies. If he doesn’t do his job, they’re dead, out here in the middle of space, and all Minnie and Daisy’s hopes die with them.

(He didn’t tell Tenten everything Minnie said; it’s only relevant if he _can_ get the keyblade back, if he can pass it to her, because then they’ll need to go look for Minnie’s husband together to try to set things right. If that doesn’t happen—

It will. He believes that. He has no other choice.)

“Chip and Dale said you could practice maneuvers around the Castle,” Riku reminds her. “It’s supposed to be safe here.”

“I know, I know,” Tenten says, easing forward. Her hands are sure on the controls, her face screwed up in concentration. “Let’s see…”

She finds the button for the Haste, and tries out turning with it, making a face when the rocket fights her, turns in a wide arc rather than the tighter one she clearly wants. She figures out how to jerk the steering controls sharply enough to make the rocket barrel-roll one way and then the other, evasive maneuvers they’re sure to need.

When she’s satisfied with her abilities—after an enviably short time, but that’s Tenten for you—she turns their rocket in the direction of Yen Sid’s location-marker and pushes the controls forward.

They both keep their eyes sharp and wary on the space around them, Riku splitting his attention between his section of the window and the map display, for several minutes.

“Did Queen Minnie say what kind of world this guy’s on?” Tenten asks.

Riku looks over at her. Refocuses. They can’t afford his inattention. (He can’t mess something _else_ up. He already got Cat killed.) “Not really. Daisy mentioned a tower, but she said it’s been a long time since even Minnie’s husband saw him.”

“Huh.” Another long pause. Tenten practices dodging on a string of asteroids that spin toward them. “Is he—y’know, like them, do you think?”

“Like them?”

“ _You_ know. They’re all like summons, but I’ve never _heard_ of a mouse summoning contract, or ducks, or badgers. I’m sure they exist!” she adds quickly. “I just don’t know anyone in Konoha who’s actually _met_ one.”

Once again, Riku’s incomplete ninja education rears its head. “What’s a summoning contract?”

At least Tenten doesn’t make him feel bad for asking. She just answers. “It’s a pretty rare type of seal that binds a ninja to a particular species. Some families and clans pass them along; others, you have to prove yourself to a member of that species to get. Once you sign it, you’re able to summon that kind of animal when you need it.”

“That sounds…useful.” Wait. “When Sound attacked, there was a giant snake that broke the wall. Was that a summon?”

“Yep. The Sannin are _famous_ for having big, flashy summons that _no one else has_.”

Riku doesn’t need to look at her to know her eyes gleam. “And now you want a contract no one else has, too.”

He glances over and is rewarded by a strong blush and a pout. “I’m just thinking! Wouldn’t a mouse summon be _useful_?”

Only one of Riku’s three courier missions has involved any element of espionage, but he thinks back to when he infiltrated Sound, and even farther, to the first time he was kidnapped.

A mouse could have slipped through the bars of his cage and found his uncle. A mouse could have snuck through the base and discovered that Sakura and Sasuke were long gone.

“Yeah.” And, because he knows Tenten, “I have a couple blank scrolls in my pack, if you want to try writing one.” It’s all he has to offer—some paper, essentially. It feels too small: hey Tenten, sorry I didn’t save our world, but here’s some blank paper. Riku’s cheeks burn.

The engines die, rocket suspended in space without even the slight rocking Riku feels, in his bones, ought to be there. Tenten swings around in her seat, open-mouthed, staring.

Riku refuses to look at her. He keeps his eyes trained on the map and the window before him.

Eventually, Tenten goes back to captaining the rocket, but her, “That’d be great. Thanks, Riku,” is a little rough, a little choked-up.

It’s ridiculous; it’s just _paper_. Surely Yen Sid will have some. For that matter, Minnie definitely had plenty of paper in the castle. There’s no reason for Tenten to treat it like this, like his offer is some grand gesture that touches her heart or whatever.

She must feel worse about Konoha than he thought, if she’s reacting like this. And as soon as Riku has _that_ thought, he wants to kick himself—of _course_ she feels worse than she seems, because she’s bottling everything up to be strong for _him_ , because he can’t keep it together.

Tenten knows how weak he is, knows he’s at fault and can’t even confront him about it without him falling to pieces. She probably thinks he’s offering out of a sense of guilt—and maybe he is.

She might not even mean it; she could have gotten choked up out of anger, not gratitude. In fact, that makes a lot more sense, that she froze out of shock and as soon as that wore off, the irritation set in. Her words didn’t sound sarcastic, but she could just be modulating her tone, trying not to set him off again.

The Heartless could attack at any minute. The last thing Tenten needs to worry about is an upset ninja in her cockpit, too. Riku nods to himself, satisfied, and resolves to keep his mouth shut unless he absolutely must say something.

⁂

The longer they go without meeting resistance, the more Tenten worries, so it’s a relief when Riku snaps, “Enemy sighted.”

Tenten rolls just in time to avoid the first batch of lasers from their rear. A small battalion of Heartless rockets sweep past them from underneath, wheeling around more nimbly than their rocket, which moves like an out-of-shape civilian in the middle of the night. Tenten scowls at the controls, but her ire won’t make them any wieldier.

“More on our six,” Riku reports.

And no weapons, no way to tell whether the enemies behind them are _directly_ behind or above or below. Tenten grimaces and tries rolling away from enemy fire at the last second, hoping the Heartless will take some of each other out.

It’s not that successful. Only one ship of every dozen goes down, only to be replaced by three more.

“You could try flying at a wall and dodging before you hit it,” Riku offers, sounding weirdly hesitant. “That works sometimes.”

“What kind of ninja have _you_ been fighting?” Tenten asks, tone laced with exaggerated judgment.

Riku’s jaw tightens and he glances away. Tenten wants to bang her head against the console or scream at herself—she _knows better_ than that, dammit. Especially after he clammed up earlier—and _right_ after the first sign of normalcy she’s seen from him since Cat stopped them in the middle of the forest. At this rate, she’ll only have herself to blame when he completely withdraws.

Out of apology more than hope, she tries Riku’s wall fake-out strategy. Shockingly, it _does_ work, and in enough numbers to make it Tenten’s best option for thinning the enemy ranks. Unfortunately, she didn’t practice it in advance, and the learning curve is…steep.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, as the rocket scrapes along the side of an asteroid right in front of Riku. He flinches every time they collide with something; it can’t be good for his nerves.

“It’s fine,” he says, voice tight. “More at four o’clock.”

She wants to make a joke about messing up the paint job, but the words won’t align correctly in her head, not in the face of Riku’s shallow breathing and darting gaze. He looks one wrong move away from a panic attack.

As soon as she thinks she can get away with it, Tenten _shunshins_ the rocket away from the horde, and watches out of the corner of her eye as Riku relaxes, muscle by muscle.

“You want a turn steering?” she offers, hoping that taking some control will be good for him. It might give him an outlet for any nervous energy he still has, plus it would be good for him to be proactive instead of relying on her to make the decisions.

And he’s a _courier_. He needs to _move_. He may not be able to physically move around in the rocket, but he can _move the rocket_. It must be better than just sitting there, watching the screen for incoming enemies. 

Riku’s immediate, emphatic denial puts paid to those ideas. It makes her frown, but she’s already worried about so many things with him; she throws one more concern on the pile and resolves not to ask again until after they’ve talked to Yen Sid.

If Yen Sid somehow makes Riku worse, she’s gonna scream in his face, see if she doesn’t.

⁂

Sora, along with Donald and Goofy, ring the bell three times, fight the giant Heartless— _another_ suit of armor—and seal Traverse Town’s keyhole. The world won’t be Heartless-free after this, but the Heartless will thin out, and Kairi won’t have to worry about the world collapsing around her while she sleeps.

(It’s. Disturbingly easy, fighting the Heartless without Kairi. It should be harder, shouldn’t it? Kairi’s always right in the thick of their fights, blasting magic in every direction and trying ninja stunts to take out the Heartless. Even the fights she hasn’t done well in, like the thing with Cerberus and then just yesterday with Sasuke… Even then, Kairi held her own, right there with Sora.

So, shouldn’t fighting a Heartless—a _big_ one—without her be harder?)

Merlin and the Fairy Godmother put a “stasis spell” on Kairi. It looks like a soap bubble, and through the distortions, Sora can barely make out Kairi’s peacefully sleeping face. They say they’ll keep it up until Sora can return with the King, and in the meantime, the darkness won’t be able to take over any more of her body. She won’t even know, they promise, because she’ll stay asleep the whole time.

That’s for the best. Kairi hates being alone, and if she knew Sora was leaving her, she’d be _so mad_. This way, at least, she won’t be lonely.

“What’s she dreaming about?” Sora asks, kneeling next to her bed with his hands clasped around hers.

The Fairy Godmother hums, soft, thoughtful. “Good dreams only. My powers can ensure that much.”

Sora smiles at Kairi, wishing he could hug her. “Good. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Kairi wanted to rush through the worlds to save Riku, and she’d been _right_. Maybe if he’d listened to her—

But no, Cid said they needed the Navi-Gummis they’d gotten from sealing the worlds to find the next set. Who knows how many worlds they’ll have to go through to find the King? Sora just needs to be quicker about finding and sealing those keyholes.

That sounds good; that sounds _doable_. And he’ll still be making those worlds safer for the people living on them.

⁂

“I swear, running up the outside would have been faster than this.”

Riku grimaces. “Lee and Gai would run up these on their hands.”

Tenten huffs, torn between being happy that Riku’s talking again and irritation at what he’s saying. “Lee and Gai-sensei would _race_ each other up these, _on their hands_ , in half the time it’s taken us, because they are _actually insane_. That doesn’t mean we have to be like them!”

They aren’t out of breath, at least. No students of Gai-sensei would ever let a simple set of _magically extended stairs_ wind them. But the walk drags on, dull, plodding minutes, and Riku isn’t a sparkling conversationalist at the _best_ of times.

Not that Tenten’s much better: the mention of Lee and Gai-sensei squeezes air out of her lungs, tightens her throat, and sets her eyes burning. She pushes these reactions down, down, down, seals them away into her heart until she can deal with them.

Now isn’t the time.

Unfortunately, between them they’re a mess of conversational landmines.

Every so often, the stairs lead to a door, which opens to an empty room and another door, which sends them to another staircase. They scour the first one, sure it’s a trap or test of some sort.

No such luck.

After the second room, Riku seems as sick of the silence as she is. “Tell me about summoning contracts,” he says—demands—and she considers for a moment, then obliges.

By the time they make it to the last door, she’s shoveled more fuuinjutsu theory into his ears than he probably ever wanted, but whatever, he asked for it and she was happy to go on about a topic she knows so well. It’s almost a disappointment when they push open the door and find a furnished study, complete with a desk and the tallest human man Tenten’s ever laid eyes on.

“Welcome,” the man who must be Yen Sid says. His voice sounds exactly as it should: deep, old, wise. “Please, come in.”

⁂

Riku was prepared to only pay enough attention to Yen Sid to translate for Tenten; he was prepared to wait through some long-winded explanation of the keyblade and then ask his questions.

Will the keyblade ever come back? How can we find the King? Can the keyblade really restore lost worlds, and all the people who lived on them?

Yen Sid doesn’t give him the opportunity for any of that. He stares deeply at Riku, wringing out the silence until it’s unbearable, and then he asks, “Why are you here?”

Riku exchanges a look with Tenten, steels himself. If Yen Sid can’t help him with the keyblade…

“Riku can’t summon his keyblade,” Tenten says. Riku grimaces, but nods when Yen Sid looks at him. “We were hoping you’d be able to help. Queen Minnie sent us.”

“Ah. You are a piece of the puzzle Mickey seeks to solve.” Yen Sid folds his hands on his desk. “Show me.”

Riku, after a moment of confusion and a glance at Tenten (who gives him an encouraging smile as bad as her non-judgmental face), raises his hand and tries to call his keyblade.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“I see.” Yen Sid eyes Riku like he really can diagnose the problem on sight alone. “Tell me: how did you gain the keyblade?”

“It just…came to me.”

Yen Sid hums. “No one gave it to you?”

Riku shakes his head, then pauses. Tenten watches him with an open, non-judgmental expression. (He’s about sick of that expression on her face.)

“I don’t…” He frowns. “I used to have a dream about a man who just showed up one day. He said a lot of weird stuff, and he had something that might’ve been a keyblade, I guess.” He shrugs. “It was just a dream.” At Yen Sid’s grave expression, he blinks, asks, “Wasn’t it?”

“Likely not. Tell me, young man, how would you describe this stranger?”

“I don’t know. It was a dream I had a long time ago.”

Tenten lightly punches Riku’s arm. He turns his frown on her, but she just raises her eyebrows, unimpressed. “I thought you got all that fancy courier training. Don’t _tell_ me they didn’t go over memory-work with you.”

Riku straightens and closes his eyes. He _was_ trained to hone his memory and recall details. The problem is, Yen Sid’s asking about something from years ago— _before_ all that “fancy training”—and Riku is only good at remembering the things he sets out to remember. If he’s paying attention, looking for details? Sure, yeah, he’s good. If he’s not? He still struggles to recall names.

Idly, he runs through the recent ones: Minnie, Daisy, Chip, Dale. They’re looking for King Mickey. Good. He’s not likely to forget any of those.

But the man from his dream…?

“He was tall,” Riku says, “but I was little, so that doesn’t mean much. Uh. He had light brown hair—I remember because…” His throat closes. The man’s hair was close to the same shade as Sora’s. “Weird clothes. They looked kind of ceremonial?” He tries to recall anything else, but finally sighs in defeat. “That’s all I can remember.”

“Hm.” Yen Sid steeples his fingers. “I will need to think on this. In the meantime, I believe introductions are in order. I am Yen Sid.”

They introduce themselves, and Yen Sid nods at each of them.

“This will take some time to sort out. Luckily, time is malleable here, in my domain.” He turns his attention on Tenten next. “And you, young lady? Why have you come?”

Tenten looks shocked to be addressed—in Konoha, she fades into the background, less flashy than her teammates despite all the weapons and seals. Riku knows the feeling.

“Me? I’m just here to help Riku.”

Yen Sid stares at her.

She flounders a bit, put on the spot as she is, and turns a pleading glance on Riku. He opens his mouth, but Yen Sid raises one hand and says, “Let her speak for herself.” Then he meets Tenten’s eyes and repeats, “Why have you come?”

(That seems unfair to Riku—hadn’t Tenten spoken for him? They’re teammates. There’s nothing wrong with one stepping in when the other flounders.

 _Of course_ Yen Sid wants to hear from Tenten and not Riku.)

“To…help,” she says, flustered, pink-cheeked. “I want to get Konoha back. And I want to learn everything I can.”

“I see.” Yen Sid settles back in his chair, hands folded in his lap now. “Very well then. I will see to the details. You two will have as much time as you require, and you may stay here until you have found what you seek. I will provide what assistance I can, although I must say again that I cannot train you, young Riku, in the keyblade. Should you require magical instruction, however, I would be happy to provide it.”

“Thank—” Tenten starts.

Yen Sid cuts her off, holding up a finger. “However,” he says, “there is a limit to my abilities. Should you wish to leave, I cannot and will not stop you, but doing so will break the enchantment. Time will resume its normal flow, and I am afraid there is not much of it left before the situation can no longer be salvaged.”

“So…we’re stuck here,” Riku says.

Yen Sid inclines his head. “That is one way to look at it, yes. I will make arrangements for your rooms, and access to a library. If you need anything else, merely ask, and I will provide what I can.”

“One room, please,” Tenten says. “Two beds.”

Any other adult ought to have some concerns about them _asking_ for the same room. But not Yen Sid—he just nods and says, “Very well,” like it isn’t a big deal.

Not that it _is_ a big deal, just—people usually make it out to be one. Riku’s spent time with mostly girls, and he knows the assumptions people make. (And Tenten ought to have some space away from him. Now, he’ll have to work harder not to be underfoot.)

“One of the brooms will show you where to go.”

Before Riku can question _that_ direction, the door behind them opens, and in walks—yep, that’s a broom, its bristles divided into two legs, little arms at its sides.

Magic. Riku shakes his head, staring at it. Sora would get a kick out of this. He would love everything about the tower—would have already run through it twice, sticking his face into every nook and cranny until he had ferreted out all its secrets to show to Riku and Kairi, the same way he showed them pretty shells and beautiful fish and particularly cool flowers.

Riku swallows and, a step behind Tenten, follows the broom out of Yen Sid’s study.

⁂

“I don’t like leaving her,” Donald complains. He’s talked to Aerith, to Merlin, to the Fairy Godmother—and to everyone who will stand still long enough—but there are no good solutions.

If they stay, they won’t do Kairi any good. They can’t really _help_ her. All they can do is hope to find the King as quickly as possible, and hope he knows some way to remove the darkness.

None of them like it, though, and Donald’s muttered complaints drive needles into Sora’s heart. “We’re _helping_ her,” he snaps.

“Gawrsh, fellas, I’m sure she wouldn’t want us all ta be arguin’,” Goofy cuts in—right in time to stop what might’ve been the fifth argument before they even make it onto the ship.

Donald subsides at that. Sora cocks his head. “I guess not,” he says, because Kairi was always a bit mercurial when he and Riku had spats. Sometimes, she picked sides, but sometimes, she declared they were both stupid and needed to leave her out of it, storming off.

If they really irritated her, she’d storm off to the boats and take theirs with her, forcing them to talk eventually, or else wait for Kairi to send someone back after them.

(She’d threatened to tell their parents they were having a sleepover on the play island if they didn’t sort themselves out quickly enough—and they actually _did_ that often enough, and on short notice most of the time, that their parents would believe her. Luckily, they’d always reconciled before Kairi stranded them together for their own good.)

“Besides,” Goofy says, “the quicker we head out, the quicker we’ll be back!”

 _That_ gets Donald and Sora moving. Cid explains how to reach the new map through something called a “warp hole,” and explains that he installed a gummi block that lets them come back to places they’ve already visited a lot quicker.

“Ya mighta seen some weird things floating out in gummi space, like rings with spiky bits and other doodads attached to ’em. Activate those and you’ll save yerselves a lot of time in the future. Any one of ‘em will let ya hop to any others.” He sniffs, swipes at his nose; his eyes are red-rimmed. “Get back quick.”

“We will,” the three chorus, and head out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is doing ok!!! Please keep yourselves hydrated, well-rested, and safe.
> 
> I expect to have the next chapter out in two weeks, on **March 28-29**. I have bounced back and currently have a three chapter buffer, so we are All Good. (I'm about halfway through Act 2, so forewarning: this fic is going to be more than 15 chapters long. I'll update the chapter count when I know more.)


	9. Agrabah & Yen Sid's Tower (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sora, Donald, and Goofy see A Thing (watch this gummi space 2) and meet a princess! Elsewhere, Riku makes even worse life choices than he has previously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content notes:** Canon-typical violence (Naruto canon). Reckless, deliberate self-endangerment that could be read as self-harm; also, negative self-talk / skewed thinking continued from the last chapter. Please mind your comfort levels (especially with everything going on right now), and if you need to skip any of that, you can read up until "Riku waits for the others to be busy."
> 
> This chapter is presented with thanks to [NightFlowerLuv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightFlowerLuv/pseuds/NightFlowerLuv), who beta'd it and reminded me that Cerberus, like, Exists.
> 
> Because it's come up with a few people, let me take a quick moment to offer some reassurances: this story is tagged "Angst with a Happy Ending" for a reason. Riku, Kairi, and Sora are set up with internal and external conflicts and they're going to work through them; it'll be rough, but I promise you, we'll get there.
> 
> I really appreciate all you readers, both the ones who have been around since _Becoming Ninja_ and the new readers who have picked this series up along the way. I hope you continue to enjoy this story, and thank you for sticking with me. 💕

“First stop,” Sora says, as he eases into normal flying speed, “warp hole!”

They find it easily—it’s a giant, well, _hole_ , a gaping maw of swirling gummi space that sucks them in as soon as Sora gets close to it. The warp process is disorienting, but less jarring than he expected. Lights streak past on either side, increasing until he can’t see anything but the light, and then—

A whole new world—worlds, rather, four dark points registered on the gummi map, alongside some different-looking points that Sora assumes are what Cid told them about. Places they can hop between, to save themselves travel time in the future.

“Next stop,” Donald says, and points officiously at the nearest point, “that world!”

Easier said than done: Sora doesn’t expect any kind of _weather_ in gummi space, but as he navigates closer to the world, huge drifts of sand block his way, despite the lack of wind. They clump up into moving dunes, and when two drifts collide, they become a temporary sand twister, pulling in any nearby dunes, rocks, and Heartless ships—and spitting them back out at terminal speeds.

Sora and the others watch a Heartless ship try to avoid one such twister, only to get caught and funneled upward. The hapless ship is flung out the top, only to crash into a huge piece of floating stonework that might, once, have been part of a tower on an immense palace.

The Heartless splinters into sparks at the collision.

“Let’s…avoid those,” Sora says, and Donald and Goofy nod along with him.

Avoiding all the twisters, dunes, and other obstacles takes them so far out of their way, it might have just been faster to go to the next world over first. But if they had, they would have missed the suspicious-looking planetoid tucked away inside a circle of stationary sand dunes.

There are no entrances or landing spots on the planetoid, and shooting the sides does no good. It’s made of an impenetrable black rock; blasts from their cannons fizzle into nothing. The only thing resembling a weak point is a crater on one side, sand as black as the rock around it shifting and swirling and somehow not spilling down into the depths of gummi space.

Shooting that does no good, either.

Sora’s just about to give up when Donald yelps in alarm and shouts, “Enemy incoming!”

Sure enough, the radar shows an enemy ship approaching fast from their rear. When Sora turns the ship around, though, all he can see is a streak of white.

Then the streak comes closer, closer, closer, and Sora realizes _that_ _’s the enemy ship_. “It’s too fast!” he cries out, trying to aim at it without success, the ship rapidly outpacing his shots. “Watch out!”

But it doesn’t fire at them, doesn’t even seem to _notice_ them; the white ship merely flies straight into the crater of sand, swallowed up between one instant and the next.

They all stare. The planetoid shivers but gives no other sign of being affected. For all Sora knows, the crater might be a mouth (no teeth though…) and it’s _digesting_ the ship now.

“So…that was weird, right?” Sora asks. “It isn’t just me?”

“No, that was definitely peculiar,” Jiminy says. “But I’m afraid we don’t have time to investigate now. Much as it pains me to say it, I think we need to move on.”

Goofy nods. “Kairi’s countin’ on us!”

Reluctantly, Sora turns the ship away from the scene, and steers them back en route to the next world, which isn’t all that far off, now.

“Agrabah, huh? Alright, Agrabah, here we come!”

⁂

Agrabah is a desert city, which means it’s _dry_. Sora wrinkles his nose as he, Donald, and Goofy poke around the abandoned room they land in. House? He _hopes_ no one lives here—there isn’t anything like a bed.

“I don’t like this,” Donald mutters. “Where is everyone?”

“Probably hidin’ from the Heartless.”

Sora sighs. “Well, we need to find _someone_ to give us some clues, otherwise we have to search this whole _world_ for the keyhole.”

And, unspoken: they don’t have time for that. Kairi is waiting for them, counting on them. Sora can’t let her down.

(They need to find the King. They need to find the keyhole to help the world and to, hopefully, find more Navi-Gs, just in case the king isn’t in this section of gummi space, either. They need to find a way to restore all the lost worlds, just in case Riku isn’t okay. Sora isn’t the kind of person to keep lists of priorities; trying to put one of those above the others sits wrong in his gut.)

They head back to the city streets, where they find Heartless, Heartless, and more Heartless. Sora can’t even keep any of the cool, curved swords the Heartless use, because the blades all disappear as soon as he bashes their owners the last time with his keyblade.

Finally, in a dead-end, Sora spots a girl hiding— _very_ poorly—between some propped-up carpets. The alley itself looks suspiciously like a troop of Heartless have run through it: splinters from cracked wooden crates scattered everywhere, scorch marks all over the ground and walls, especially in the opposite corner from where the girl is hiding.

“Don’t come any closer,” the girl warns when Sora steps over to her. “Those things are just after me. Leave me here and they’ll leave you alone.”

Sora looks over at Donald, then Goofy, but they’re just as confused as he is. “Are you…hiding from the Heartless? There aren’t any here.”

The girl pokes her head out from behind a fringe of carpet, eyes flicking all over the alley. Then she sighs and eases out into the open.

“I’m glad; I didn’t think they’d ever go away. Oh, but more will come soon.” She bites her lip, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “I wish he’d come back already…”

Sora tips his head to the side. “Who’s he? Someone we can help you find?”

The girl’s eyes light up. “Would you? His name’s Aladdin. He showed me a place to hide nearby and left, but that was a while ago.” Then she blinks, seems to realize she hasn’t introduced herself yet, and says, “I’m Jasmine. And you are?”

After introductions, Goofy asks, “Any idea where Aladdin went?”

Jasmine shakes her head. “No, I’m afraid not. He just said it was important. And with Jafar’s goons and these creatures roaming the streets, I’m worried he won’t be able to get back.”

“Who’s this Jafar?” Donald crosses his arms over his chest. “Is he working with the—creatures?” He corrects himself at the last second and sends a baleful look at Sora when Sora snorts at him.

Jasmine looks surprised at that. “You haven’t heard of him? He’s the royal vizier. He's gained evil powers and seized Agrabah. He's desperately looking for something he calls the keyhole.”

At that, Sora sends a significant look Donald’s way. _Jackpot_. He turns back to Jasmine. “Do you know where that is?”

Shaking her head, she says, “No, I don’t. And I’m very worried about Aladdin…”

“Don’t worry too much about that street rat,” a sneering voice says from above them.

The man standing on the upraised platform has on _way_ too many clothes for the heat: Sora isn’t sure how he avoids sweating through all that dark red and black cloth. Maybe the dark colors are to hide his sweat? His hand is clasped around a staff with an ornamental snake head on the top end, and the look on his face is like someone took a frown and then let it curdle in the sun all day long.

“What did you do to him?” Jasmine demands.

“Uh, Jasmine, I think you should—” Sora tries, but he’s cut off by Jafar’s cold laugh.

“Why, nothing yet, princess. But when I get my hands on him— Never you mind that, though. I’m afraid your current company is equally unsuitable, my dear. I’ll simply have to get rid of them first.”

At a wave of his hand, four Heartless with swords appear on the ledge, slipping down and brandishing those swords at the group. As they advance, Jafar pauses as if in consideration, then walks off, calling behind him, “This can all be over, princess, if you would just come back to the palace.”

Sora barely has time to shout, “Jasmine, run!” before the Heartless are on them. Uselessly, it turns out, because as soon as one steps close to Jasmine, she clasps her hands in front of her, then falls into a ready stance, hands balled into fists and up in an amateur guard position.

A bubble of light springs up around her, crackling with lightning, neatly bisecting the Heartless that got too close. It shatters into sparks and a pink crystal heart instantly.

“Whoa,” Sora breathes.

“I can’t hold it for very long!” Jasmine shouts. “Quickly!”

Sora has never demolished Heartless so fast in his _life_. Donald and Goofy, too, lay into the Heartless more vigorously than usual.

The last Heartless falls to Goofy’s shield just as Jasmine’s flickers out and she drops to her knees, panting. Sora and the others rush over to her, but she seems fine, if out of breath and tired.

“That was _awesome_!” Sora tells her, right as Donald asks, “What _was_ that?” and Goofy offers her a hand up.

“Thanks,” Jasmine says, smiling at each of them, then addresses Donald: “I’m…not sure. It just happens, recently, when those monsters attack me. I can’t do much with it, though—I can’t move, or protect someone else, unless they stand next to me.”

It sounds like she’s put out by all that, but as far as Sora’s concerned, it’s a _great_ power. “But _you_ _’re_ safe. And if you have friends like us around, we can take care of the rest!” He gestures at the now-cleared alleyway. “So, hey, forget what I said before: stick with us. We’ll all look for this Aladdin guy together, and between the four of us, I’m sure we’ll find him!”

Jasmine looks touched at that. “I’d like to help. I can show you where we hid—maybe we can find some clues there.”

“Great! Lead the way!”

She does. A few more Heartless pop up, but they take care of them; Jasmine hunkers down in her shield that makes any Heartless who try to go after her regret the experience, while the others mop up the rest.

Once the Heartless are gone, Jasmine needs to catch her breath again, and, out of her earshot, Donald mutters angrily to Sora: “You can’t replace Kairi with some random girl!”

Sora scowls back. “I’m not _replacing_ her.”

“Then we don’t need to bring her with us.”

“But she’s helping! And that Jafar guy’s a real piece of work—you want to leave her behind where _he_ might come after her?”

Donald looks a little mutinous even as he says, “No. But we don’t have time to look for Aladdin! We need to find the _keyhole_!”

“We can do both!” Sora tries.

Donald glares at him.

Sora sighs. “Okay, look. If we find any clues about the keyhole, we’ll follow them, but for right now, we might as well try to help this Aladdin guy.”

At that, Donald subsides, grumbling unhappily as he walks over to Goofy and Jasmine, who leads them the rest of the way to what looks like Aladdin’s hideout. There, they don’t find Aladdin, but they _do_ find a flying carpet, which is about the coolest thing Sora’s seen on his adventures yet.

He just wishes Kairi had been here to see it.

⁂

The carpet brings them to a dark, shaded patch of desert, surrounded by rocky outcroppings. The carpet also brings them straight into a fight with scimitar-wielding Heartless, and it’s the first fight where Jasmine’s shield crumbles before all the Heartless are gone. She screams, and instantly, everyone’s attention is on her, where a stray humanoid flying Heartless has lifted her into the air and started carrying her toward Agrabah. A few more swoop down to harry Sora and his friends.

Sora’s Jungle King flies out past those annoyances, thwacking the flying Heartless right in the back. It doesn’t dissipate, but it does let go of Jasmine, who plummets straight into Goofy’s waiting arms.

Donald and Sora take care of the rest with Thunder and Blizzard spells, while Goofy keeps his shield close to Jasmine.

A young man caught in some sand at the center of the clearing coughs and pulls himself free, triggering another crew of Heartless Bandits to appear.

“Genie!” he cries out, holding up a weirdly shaped metal contraption. “Get rid of—huh?”

Goofy’s shield obliterates the last of the Heartless, the sand smoking with the remnants of Sora and Donald’s Fire spells and scorched from Jasmine’s apparently refreshed shield.

A big blue—man? Is that a man? A big blue _person_ appears out of the young man’s contraption, saying, in a boisterous voice that any of Sora’s teachers would have killed to have on sleepy Monday mornings, “Hey Al! You rang?” Then the person blinks at Sora and the others. “Well, this is unexpected. And who are you folks?” He turns to the young man (Al??). “Do we know them?”

“ _Aladdin_!” Jasmine cries, flinging herself into the young man’s arms.

“ _Jasmine_? What are you doing here?” Aladdin tries to surreptitiously pass the contraption to his pet monkey, who—has it been here this whole time? Sora eyes it curiously, wondering if it talks.

Unfortunately, the monkey is no match for Donald’s curiosity—when Aladdin passes the contraption to the monkey, Donald plucks it right out of the animal’s tiny hands, examining it with interest. His declaration of, “This is _magic_!” promptly gets everyone’s attention.

“Ah—” the blue person says, as Aladdin yelps and yanks it out of Donald’s hands.

Jasmine leans in to look at it herself, and when Aladdin doesn’t move away from _her_ , Sora follows her lead. “What is it?” Jasmine asks, while Sora reaches out to poke it.

Feels like metal, not magic.

The blue person takes over the introductions and explanations, bowing ostentatiously to Jasmine, shaking Goofy’s hand, and giving Donald no less than four dubious looks as he lays out the whole magic-lamp-cosmic-power deal.

They decide to head back into Agrabah and foil Jafar’s undoubtedly wicked plots, while Donald shoots Sora a lot of irritated glares. But it isn’t Sora’s fault! The keyhole probably _is_ in the city, and Aladdin promises to use his second wish to find it for them—because his third wish is already promised to free Genie.

“Wait, he’s not free _now_?” Sora asks, bewildered. He looks from Aladdin to Genie to Jasmine and back. “Why not?!”

Genie takes a deep breath to launch into his spiel again, while Donald stomps ineffectually on Sora’s foot and hisses “ _world order_ ” in the least sneaky whisper ever.

Whatever. Sora knows what’s right, and freeing people who are trapped is _right_. He gives the lamp a narrow-eyed look of consideration. His keyblade would be able to unlock it, wouldn’t it?

“We might need his help,” Aladdin tries to argue, but that’s crap and Sora knows it.

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Then we can ask for it when he’s free.” Sora turns to Jasmine. “ _You_ agree with me, don’t you?”

Kairi would back him up in a heartbeat. Jasmine hesitates, but comes through, nodding and stepping over to stand next to him.

“I do,” she says. “I know what it’s like to feel trapped.”

Aladdin still looks torn. On his shoulder, his monkey screeches what seems like a definitive _no, don_ _’t listen to them_ —so it can’t really talk, and also, it’s a jerk. The flying carpet, on the other hand, has inched closer to their side, though its whole weird rug-posture looks poised to spook and dart away at any wrong gesture.

Genie stares at Aladdin with big, hopeful eyes, though he shifts to a blanker expression when Aladdin looks at him. “Your wishes are up to you,” he says with a shrug, forced humor in his voice. “You’re the master, Al!”

Aladdin winces at that and holds the lamp up. “Then, Genie, I wish for your—”

And a red blur swoops down and steals the lamp.

⁂

Sora _really_ wishes Kairi were here for this: she’s much better at running up the sides of things and leaping off them. He _tries_ , but it isn’t enough to catch the bird with Genie’s lamp.

Jasmine, Aladdin, Donald, and Goofy race through the streets of Agrabah just behind him, cutting down the Heartless that spring into existence to block their way. Jasmine can’t move when her shield’s up, so she starts forming and then dropping it in rapid succession, catching Heartless unaware and electrocuting them. A few burst into sparks and disintegrate, but more are just shocked still and easy targets for the others. Doing that, especially so many times in a row, leaves her woozy, and Aladdin and Goofy have to stop to help her straighten and start moving again, losing precious time.

Sora tries to hit the bird with his keyblade a few times, but the bird dodges easily, making a sound suspiciously similar to a cackle. Is it _laughing_ at him?

They’re led all the way up to the giant gates of the even more giant palace (which don’t have anything on Konoha, but are impressive nonetheless), where Jafar waits with his hand extended.

The bird drops the lamp into Jafar’s hand.

“As I expected, you fools were good for one thing,” Jafar says, as Genie’s smoke spills out of the mouth of the lamp, forming itself into a big blue person with a hangdog expression and downcast eyes. “And now your usefulness is at an end. O Genie, hear my first wish: bring me the princess.”

He says _princess_ with such emphasis that Sora thinks it must be the only important thing about Jasmine to him. Jafar’s eyes gleam and he laughs aloud when Genie instantly disappears, reappearing in front of Jasmine.

“Genie, don’t—!” Aladdin starts.

Genie, at the same time, wails, “I’m sorry, Al!” and scoops Jasmine up.

Jasmine creates her shield, but it sputters out after a second, and Genie just grits his teeth through that brief flash and doesn’t even drop her as he floats back over to Jafar. She clearly tries to make it, again and again, but it doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

“You should take care not to exhaust yourself, princess,” Jafar tells her with false sympathy. “Not that it will matter soon.” He turns to Aladdin and the others, eyeing them with disgust and contempt.

Sora has never before wanted to ball his fist up and plant it in someone’s face. Maybe he’s channeling Kairi in her absence? Kairi would _love_ to take a piece out of Jafar.

“I won’t waste the genie’s power on you. The darkness should suffice. Heartless!” He raises his snake-headed staff, angling it at the group, and shadows coalesce in a loose circle around them. “Destroy them!”

Then he, Genie, and Jasmine all fade out of sight, somehow. The only clue to their direction is the bird, who starts flapping toward the desert, _definitely_ laughing at Sora now.

Between Aladdin’s sword and quick reflexes, Goofy’s shield and accuracy, Donald’s plethora of spells, and Sora’s thwarted anger at Jafar getting away with kidnapping his friend _right in front of him_ , they make short work of the Heartless meant to kill them. At this point, Sora thinks darkly, the bad guys ought to have learned.

Anything less than a small army is just a distraction. And, sure, it works as far as that goes, but now he’s _mad_ , and the flying carpet is happy to take them back to where they met Aladdin as quickly as possible.

(Donald doesn’t even _try_ to argue that they ought to look for the keyhole instead. Either Jafar summoning the Heartless means Donald thinks they should take him out or else he knows Sora will bite his head off if he tries to protest.)

The bird isn’t there when they arrive, and for a moment, Sora considers the wide stretch of the desert with a pang of despair, but then Aladdin steps forward and a giant cat’s head forms out of the dark purple sand, its eyes glowing malevolently.

By now, Sora’s about sick of giant evil cats. The Cheshire Cat was the smallest and least evil of them, and even that one was annoying; between the one in Deep Jungle and this magic-sand-cat, though, Sora’s a dog person for _life_.

—Wait, no. Cerberus. Dogs are out, too. That leaves, what, birds? Nah, too much work, and Jafar’s pet bird has left a bad taste in his mouth for them. Fish. Fish he can handle. Especially if he makes Riku and Kairi actually take care of them.

Assuming he can…get those two back. Which he will! And then they’ll adopt some nice, pretty, easy-to-take-care-of fish.

Sora and the others handle the magic-sand-cat in front of them, of course (the eyes are _always_ the weak point, Sora’s learning—or, at least, a good place to start hitting), and the traps inside. They even beat Jafar and rescue Genie!

But all of that comes too late to save Jasmine, who they find at the keyhole with a woman who can only be Maleficent.

“I assure you, my dear, my word is good. And if you do this, you shall have it.”

“ _Jasmine_!” Aladdin screams.

She looks over, her eyes tear-stained, but before any of them can even think of jumping the pit or getting Genie to bring her to safety, Maleficent leans forward.

“You wish your city to be safe, don’t you?” she asks, and her voice is low and smooth. “The choice seems simple to me.”

“I—very well.” Jasmine gives Aladdin one last, sorrowful look, and then takes Maleficent’s outstretched hand. “For Agrabah.”

“Jasmine, _no_!”

But it’s too late: Jasmine’s eyes roll back and she slumps into Maleficent’s hold. Maleficent pats her head, just briefly, before, with a sneer, she calls, “Boy!”

A swirling portal of darkness opens and out steps Sasuke, looking dead-eyed and unrumpled. He doesn’t so much as glance in Sora’s direction.

Maleficent pushes Jasmine off her, letting the girl drop to the floor and ignoring Aladdin’s outraged cry. “Deal with her.” She spares a dismissive look for Sora. “The keyblade wielder is of no concern.”

Sasuke says nothing, just picks Jasmine up in a fireman’s carry and takes her through the portal, Maleficent following just behind.

Sora tries to shoot a Fire spell at her back, but it bounces off an invisible shield. Maleficent pauses at the threshold of the dark portal and turns.

“Do not test me, boy,” she says. “You are useful, for now. As soon as your usefulness runs out, I will deal with you.” A pause, and then her lips curve up. “As your little friend was dealt with.”

Sora’s thrown keyblade goes through the space where Maleficent and her portal were and hits the wall past that with the loud clang of metal on stone. Sora drops to his knees, furious tears slipping down his cheeks, and punches the floor to get some of the aggravation out.

It doesn’t work, just makes his knuckles hurt, but Aladdin and Goofy both put their hands on his shoulders, and Donald pushes up against his face and mutters dire promises to take down that Maleficent, and all that does make him feel slightly better.

⁂

Riku waits for the others to be busy.

It takes longer than waiting ever did in Konoha. Usually, he’d just bide his time until Gai turned his attention on one of his other students—Lee and Neji were both reliable attention-grabbers, though Tenten had her moments. Gai would leave Riku with some parting advice, and Riku would have free reign of the training ground.

The value of waiting was never to get the training ground to himself; Riku could always wander over to an empty one. Konoha had plenty. The value of waiting was getting the training ground to himself when anyone with a passing interest in Riku _thought_ he was under Gai’s supervision.

Here, it’s Yen Sid’s magic training room, and with only three people in the castle (not counting…all the enchanted things), Riku doesn’t need the illusion of supervision as much as he needs a small amount of privacy.

Besides Tenten “helpfully” checking in on him every ten minutes he’s alone, assorted enchanted helpers wander through—floating plates at mealtimes, little bells attached to letters or books Yen Sid wants Riku to look at, brooms to sweep up discarded weaponry and debris at random times. But none of that happens when Riku’s training with Yen Sid.

Riku isn’t _sure_ the enchanted stuff can spy on him and report back, but he isn’t about to take any chances. As soon as Yen Sid lets Riku know he’ll be on his own for the next few days while Yen Sid and Tenten work on a joint magic project neither has told Riku anything about, well, Riku knows what to do.

He clears the room of everything except the floorboards. Yen Sid set up targets for him; Riku takes them apart and leaves them outside the door. He even strips the light fixtures out and looks them over, just in case.

Probably overkill, but whatever.

He’s thought, and thought, and _thought_ , and come to a few realizations. He has decidedly not shared any of these with Yen Sid or Tenten—Tenten seems wholly absorbed in her magical research, and Yen Sid is more interested in teaching Riku the fundamentals of magic than he is in actually solving Riku’s problem.

When did he first get the keyblade? When Sound dropped a genjutsu over the whole stadium, right before a bunch of Sound and Sand-nin started attacking people. In other words, the first time Riku’s life was genuinely in danger.

When did he learn magic—real magic, not jutsu—for the first time? When he was in Sound, staring at Karin’s broken ribs, when _her_ life was potentially in danger and there was nothing Riku could do about it with jutsu.

Now, Yen Sid wants Riku to learn all these spells: Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, Aero. Spells Riku keeps trying to cast, with no luck at all. Spells he _ought_ to be able to cast, from the way Yen Sid’s brows furrow as he watches Riku try, and try, and try.

Riku’s magic comes from the keyblade. He can still cast Cure, thankfully, so he knows he _ought_ to be able to summon it.

But.

His life was in danger when the Heartless attacked, and Riku _didn_ _’t_ summon his keyblade. Since then, he hasn’t been able to—but also, he’s been relatively safe. Besides in the gummi rocket, and it once again didn’t occur to him to try to summon it _then_. If he had a friend throwing himself into danger like that when Riku was _right there_ and _could have helped_ , but his friend didn’t even think to ask…

Well, yeah, Riku would be a little pissed too. But if his friend was really honestly truly in danger and _asked for help_ this time, he’d be there in a heartbeat.

He can only hope the keyblade is the same way.

Unfortunately, he doubts Yen Sid would agree to Riku’s plan; adults never like taking risks, and the older they are, the more cautious they’ve become. Yen Sid would probably be happy if Riku took a decade learning magic and the keyblade reappeared out of sheer boredom.

Riku doesn’t have time for that.

With the room clear, Riku surveys the available space, hands on his hips and a frown tugging at his mouth. Then he summons a clone.

“We both know this is a stupid idea,” the clone tells him.

Riku glares at it. “Do you have a better one?”

Talking to a clone is only marginally better than talking to yourself; on a basic level, his clone _can_ _’t_ have any thoughts he hasn’t had.

The clone folds his arms over his chest. “That doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid. Tenten’s not going to be happy when she finds out.”

“Then let’s make sure she doesn’t find out until we’re done,” Riku says. “Are you ready?”

The clone waves a hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. Come back in an hour.”

The plan is to let his clone booby-trap the room. Riku leaves him with all the weapons he has and heads back to the room he shares with Tenten. Riku will come back in an hour, unarmed and unprepared for whatever’s in there.

With any luck, something his clone sets up will be lethal enough to encourage his keyblade to come back and save his life.

(Unfortunately, any safety measures he could put in place might stop the keyblade from appearing—if he isn’t actually in danger and knows it, that kills the whole idea. He _knows_ Tenten wouldn’t approve, because Gai would never approve, so she can’t know until he’s tested it.)

⁂

The first course Riku’s clone sets up takes Riku about ten minutes to endanger his life.

He steps through the door exactly one hour after he left, and dodges to the left. A knife embeds into the door where his head was, but his hand stays keyblade-free. Okay. Not good enough.

The room is transformed: some of the light fixtures have been taken apart, others have been covered or otherwise shaded, leaving the room covered in darkness and shadows with scattered pools of light. Riku isn’t surprised to see fog creeping along the floor, either: he’s practiced enough genjutsu on himself to recognize it, though he makes no move to disrupt the illusion.

A second knife flies out of the darkness, almost hitting Riku’s chest. He ducks, then has to roll away from a hail of throwing stars. Probably illusory, since he didn’t have that many weapons to begin with—but his clone might have mixed real and fake weapons together.

Still no keyblade. Riku keeps flexing his right hand, hopeful, and it stays empty.

He walks toward the nearest lit spot, hopping over a tripwire and catching the first blow of his clone’s staff directly to his lower back. He falls forward onto hands and knees, biting his lip not to cry out. He tucks and rolls forward, spinning around to face—nothing.

Great.

Back smarting with the beginnings of a spectacular bruise, Riku glances around, trying to spot a twitch, a stray glint of light on metal. He can’t hear anything.

The fog at his feet recedes and then comes back: his clone has to reapply the genjutsu more frequently than Riku himself would, since their chakra reserves are each half of what Riku normally has. It seems like a waste of chakra to Riku, but whatever, if his clone thinks a spooky atmosphere will help them summon the keyblade, maybe he’s right. It can’t hurt.

Riku spends another ten minutes scouting out the light spots, avoiding most of the traps set for him. A brace of knives catches his arm, shredding his sleeve and drawing blood. He steps into a bear trap and pain shrieks up his spine before he remembers that he didn’t _have_ a bear trap.

He tries to summon the keyblade to get out of the trap, with no luck. Even knowing the whole experience is fake, Riku has to sweat and shudder his way through it; he tries to suppress his chakra a few times, but chokes, pain making him fumble a procedure he would’ve sworn he could do under any conditions.

The genjutsu dissolves on its own and Riku curls up, gulping air, one hand squeezing his ankle to reassure himself it’s fine, it’s fine, nothing’s broken or bloody.

Time skips, but it must have been more than five minutes of sitting and trying to get control of his breathing when his clone taps him in the back with the butt of his staff.

“Break time,” his clone says. “Go take a shower and get dinner.”

A shower, because he stinks of fear-sweat and _still_ doesn’t have his keyblade to show for it.

“Go,” his clone says again, nudging him with the staff.

Riku shuffles to his feet, stumbling a bit even though his leg is fine. “You’ll get rid of all this?” he asks.

Unimpressed, the clone snorts. “Yeah, yeah.”

Riku sighs and heads for the door. He hesitates for a moment—something _feels_ off—and only barely ducks the knife thrown, once again, at his head.

It embeds in the door right next to the first one he dodged.

The follow-up throwing stars ought to skewer Riku, except a gust of wind envelops him, sending them mostly astray. A couple scrape his ribs, leaving bloody gashes in his shirt, but nothing compared to what could’ve happened.

“That’s a new spell,” his clone observes, sounding put out.

“Aero,” Riku says, though they both know it. His clone remembers Yen Sid’s lecture just as well as he does: Aero can be cast offensively or defensively, and the latter creates a kind of wind shield around the user, cushioning the user against damage.

Yen Sid hadn’t mentioned any kind of deflection, but he’d said it was a more advanced spell than Fire and hadn’t seemed to have much hope Riku would learn it.

(Why he still bothers trying to teach Riku is anyone’s guess—although he isn’t anymore, is he? He’s turned his attention to Tenten, who _wants_ to learn things, who is _good_ at all sorts of different skills.)

The clone casts a Cure over him, leaving his shirt a mess but taking care of the wounds, and Riku blinks, thrown off momentarily before he puts it together: of course he anticipated the attack; he’s a _healer_ , he wouldn’t let someone leave his sight still injured. Some part of his hindbrain must have put it together and nudged him to duck.

“Learning a spell is probably a good sign,” his clone offers. “Since we know magic is connected to the keyblade…”

Riku nods. It means the keyblade isn’t done with him. But: “It still didn’t come, though,” he says, and shakes his empty hand in illustration.

His clone shrugs. “Then we’ll try harder next time. You really do need that shower, though, before Tenten comes looking for you.”

Which she may, although she’s probably too absorbed in her learning to bother. “Right. Remember, if she comes by—”

“I’m gone,” the clone promises, before he steps forward and opens the door for Riku, a look on his face like he’s considering shoving Riku through if Riku doesn’t take the hint.

Well. Riku makes a petulant face at his clone—who makes the same face back, and no _wonder_ Sora and Kairi laugh, if that’s what that expression looks like—and marches off.

Halfway through his shower, his clone disperses himself and Riku gets all his memories. The trap could’ve worked if only he hadn’t remembered his clone didn’t actually have one—and the last attack _did_ work, only not as well as he wanted.

“Of course it couldn’t be _easy_ ,” Riku mutters as he towels off his too-long hair. (Seriously, he’d cut it except Tenten would point out his resemblance to Kakashi, and he just—can’t deal with that, right now. He’ll need to start tying it back, though.)

He takes dinner in the bedroom, where Tenten eventually joins him. She barely spares him a glance as she beelines for the desk, dropping an armful of books and then collapsing into the chair.

“Long day?” Riku asks, trying to be as normal as possible.

Tenten freezes, then twists around. Something in his tone or expression must be off, because her eyes narrow slightly and she sounds distracted as she says, “Yeah, you could say that. Yen Sid’s teaching me about magical summons. It’s different from the ninja method, and the differences are _exciting_.” Her eyes sharpen on him. “What about you?”

Riku shrugs. “I was just training.” He isn’t quite ready yet to tell her he knows a new spell. First, he needs to practice it until he has it down. Then, he’ll wait for a good time—like maybe when Yen Sid wants to come supervise his training again.

Having learned a new spell on his own _might_ convince Yen Sid to stay away a little longer.

Tenten looks at him for an uncomfortably long time; Riku starts to fidget under the scrutiny and feels intense relief when she finally looks away. “Well, alright then.” She turns back to her books; her shoulders slump a little as she pulls the first one in front of her and begins to read.

Despite what she said, Riku wonders if _her_ project didn’t go so well. Part of him is worried about that because she’s his friend and he doesn’t want her to be upset. The rest of him is worried that, if she doesn’t make adequate progress, Yen Sid will abandon her and come back to Riku that much sooner.

Riku can’t afford any scrutiny of his plans—not yet, maybe not ever. Not until they _work_ , or Riku’s satisfied they won’t. If he can think of some way to help Tenten, he’ll offer it, though he doesn’t hold out much hope for that actually happening, or for her actually taking him up on the offer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a break from Riku!angst, in the next chapter, we get to meet **Monstro**! :D And we'll get an interaction I have been simultaneously excited about and dreading since it occurred to me.
> 
> That chapter will go up **April 11-12th**.
> 
> Please keep yourselves safe and as healthy as possible. 💖


	10. Traverse Town (Part 3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi wakes up to the aftermath of her worst loss in battle yet. Everything isn't okay (yet), but everyone's trying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp. That was _not_ the short hiatus I intended! More notes at the bottom.
> 
> A quick recap: When last we left Kairi, she had been Dark Firaga'd by Sasuke; she met Chirithy in a dream(?), then met several young women and got to talk to Alice again, briefly. She did _not_ have a traditional Dive to the Heart, though.
> 
> (ETA: I forgot that I promised Monstro and a notable interaction in this chapter; those both got pushed back, to either next chapter or the one after.)
> 
>  **Content notes for the chapter** : discussion of a still-healing injury that impacts the character's mobility/functioning.

_You aren’t yet ready to choose._

The words echo in Kairi’s mind, push at her. Not ready, not ready, not ready. The _yet_ is irrelevant. _Not ready_.

Not ready for what? For the keyblade that she’s been wielding for months? For the magic Donald’s taught her? For the battles with the Heartless she’s survived?

Not ready to lose her home? To lose mother, friends, home, sunrises and sunsets, every memory she can call to mind clearly, every smile tucked into the sand, every laugh directed at the sky and the surf and her friends’ sunburnt faces? To see the darkness and the Heartless steal everything in breathless minutes, to grasp at what she can, to take hold of it and not let go, for the first time in her life that she can remember?

How _dare_ the voice tell her she isn’t ready! How dare anyone! How dare anyone judge her, measure her and find her wanting, when Kairi has done only and always her best, and _it_ _’s been good enough_.

She’s good enough. She is. She knows it, in her marrow, in the deep quiet places of her mind that hold all her memories, in the golden web of every heart connected to hers.

Kairi is ready. (She has to be she has to be she has to be; what use is anything if she’s not even _ready_ —)

Sleep is a riptide, pulling her under and out, but Kairi takes a deep breath and shifts to the side. She slides into wakefulness. Her body protests, sore and hurting, heavy and sluggish. Lifting her head is a trial in itself; dragging her eyelids open is so tedious and tiring, she almost slips back into sleep. Her lashes feel crusted, her vision starts off bleary and refuses to focus for a ridiculously long time.

She doesn’t wake up where she expects: her first thought is _this isn_ _’t my bed_ , followed immediately by _this isn_ _’t the gummi ship_. It is familiar, though, cozy, white sheets beneath her hands, warm brown wood and blue, blue, blue floors and ceiling and walls. She can’t place it, though, and then she can’t place herself, isn’t sure how she got here or where she last was.

The last thing she can remember, with less haziness than usual for a dream, is Chirithy, the web, light and memories, a darkened platform. Before that is a blur, a tangle of Traverse Town and adrenaline, blood and pain and fire…

Cid grumbles through the door, hands full of thermos and water bottles and potions; he slams the door shut behind him with his foot and a wince toward the bed. His eyes meet Kairi’s, and his armful of containers all thump to the floor.

“Awake,” he says, strangled. Then he collects himself and his burden, checking that none of the containers have cracked or leaked. He deposits them, haphazard, on the table just a few steps from the door. “How’re ya feelin’? How long you been up?”

Kairi frowns at him. How she got here is still fuzzy. Why isn’t she on the ship? Where are Donald and Goofy?

Where’s _Sora_?

“I’m okay,” she says, instead of _I_ _’m not sure I can sit up straight_. “I haven’t been up that long.” That might or might not be true; there’s no clock in the room for her to be sure. It doesn’t _feel_ like she’s been awake for very long, anyway.

Cid nods, eyes scouring Kairi. With the sheets and comforter pulled up over most of her, there isn’t much to see. Belatedly, Kairi tries to push the covers down, but her left shoulder…twinges.

Kairi looks down at it. The whole upper arm is swaddled in bandages, from the knob of her shoulder all the way down to her elbow. Thick bandages. Besides the twinge, though, that whole arm feels numb.

Conspicuously numb.

Before she can do more than idly poke at the bandages with her good hand (that arm unbandaged and undamaged), Cid appears at the side of the bed, armed with a frown and a thermos. He pushes the thermos into Kairi’s poking hand and smooths the bandages with light fingers.

“Drink that,” he says. “Here, let’s getcha up.” His hands slide under Kairi’s shoulders, wide and warm. He levers her up, and Kairi blinks back vertigo as he settles her against the headboard.

He isn’t satisfied when she drinks the thermos of warm, salty broth; isn’t satisfied when she takes the water bottle he hands her next and drinks that, too; isn’t even satisfied when she downs the potion he hands her. His brow stays furrowed and his hands twitch and dig into his hips.

“Leon’s set to lecture ya ‘til yer ears fall off,” he tells her, and lets Kairi puzzle over that, expression tight as he waits for some kind of response.

What exactly he wants, though, Kairi isn’t sure. If Leon’s going to lecture her, it might be remorse, but remorse for what?

After what must be too long a pause, Cid asks, “Do you…remember how you got hurt?” His words are slow, not quiet but cautious.

 _Does_ she? Fire, she remembers that hurting. And that unravels the next piece: she was hit with fire, a spell. Cast by Sasuke, ninja-Sasuke, Sasuke-from-Riku’s-stories, who said Riku was dead.

(Hadn’t Kairi been worried that the Ninja Problem would swallow Riku whole? Turns out, there was a lot more to be worried about.)

“Yes,” Kairi says, and Cid doesn’t look reassured by that. (Not good enough for him, either. Not good enough to beat Sasuke. Not good enough to save Riku. Not good enough for the keyblade.)

Cid opens another water bottle and tells her to finish it while he goes to let the others know she’s awake.

“So Leon can lecture me?”

Cid’s mouth twitches, but he can’t even manage a smile. “If yer lucky, it’ll be him and not Aerith.” A pause; he makes no move closer to the door, just stares at her. The weight of that gaze… “Ya really scared us, kid. _All_ of us. Don’t do it again.”

Kairi nods, and almost lets him go at that, but… It’s still bothering her. “Hey, Cid? Is Sora with the others?”

He’s turned away from her by then, on his way to the door, but Kairi sees the way his spine goes stiff, the way his shoulders hike up and his feet stutter to a halt. For a breathless, horrified moment, all she can think is _I wasn_ _’t fast enough, Sora got hit because I wasn’t fast enough, I couldn’t save either of them_ —

And then Cid sighs, all that tension bleeds out of him, and he turns, regret on his face but not grief. He scrubs at the back of his head, sighs, but manages a smile.

Sora must be okay. Kairi relaxes, thoughts tumbling away, even before Cid explains.

“Like I said, you scared _everyone_. Ya didn’t wake up—Merlin and the Fairy Godmother weren’t sure what would happen with the darkness. Those three took the ship to look for their king, figured _he_ might have some idea how to get you back on your feet.” A pause, a little laugh. “Sora’s gonna be pissed ya woke up ‘fore they got back. Kid didn’t want to leave in the first place.”

Okay. That’s…okay. Sora’s gone, with Donald and Goofy, and the _ship_. To look for something to help her, which is about the only thing that _would_ take Sora away from her while she was…injured? Asleep?

Kairi has an intense stab of sympathy for how Sora must have felt when she finally talked her way past his mom to let him know that Riku had left the Islands. There’s a seething pit of helpless anger in her gut, formless and irrational, that wishes he’d never left, that insists he _abandoned_ her. It’s the same pit that she casts Blizzard out of, and it chills her even under the blankets and comforter.

Kairi bundles those feelings up and stuffs them deep, deep down. It isn’t fair to Sora and it isn’t fair to her. Sora left to try to help. (Just like Riku did. Riku, who’s _gone_ now—) Being mad about it won’t help anything. All it will do is make her miserable.

So Kairi breathes, and tells the anger to _go away go away go away_ , and that works, after a little bit. Long enough for Cid to start to look concerned.

“I just hope he isn’t getting into too much trouble,” she says, and tries to grin. It must be good enough ( _finally_ ) because Cid grins back, tension leaching out of his frame.

“Not gonna put munny on that,” he says. “That kid’s a trouble magnet. The _both_ of you are,” he adds, with a hairy eyeball for her that would do her mother proud.

Kairi gives him back her most virtuous smile. Cid snorts, and leaves the room.

Well. That’s as good as permission, isn’t it?

First order of business: walking. Kairi goes to swing her legs over the side of the bed, and promptly rearranges her priorities when her vision wobbles.

First order of business: sitting up without the support of the bed and without toppling over. That takes some careful breathing and a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the mattress. It’s the _worst_ case of vertigo Kairi’s ever had.

Riku would be able to tell her all the reasons why that happened, but she can figure some out even without him. She’s been asleep for a while—and Cid didn’t say exactly how long, did he? Then again, she hadn’t thought to ask. Sitting up had been bad. Dropping her feet to the floor…

It’s a blood flow thing. So…unless there’s still a genuine problem, she should be able to get used to it, right? She just has to be patient.

Soon enough, she feels normal again, and risks shifting her weight onto her feet. Then she pushes herself off the bed entirely, flings one hand out to brace against the wall.

A fourteen-year-old shouldn’t need so much time to walk across one piddly little room, but she’s recovering from some kind of fire injury. Burns? Is that why her arm’s bandaged? With that thought in mind, Kairi makes her way over to the window, to try to get a good look at her reflection.

It isn’t as good as a mirror, but from what she can see, she’s fine. Her legs aren’t any more scarred than they were before she fought Sasuke; whatever bruises he gave her have had time to heal, or else they’ve been forcibly Cure-spelled away.

Her face looks fine. Her _head_ , though…

Well, no, her head is fine. No bandages, no cuts, no new scars. But her hair is. Is.

It looks like the weird dark fire scraped half her hair clean off, leaving just some red fuzz. Everything’s uneven, with some hanks of chin-length red hair lying over that fuzz, a few wisps and burned-short strands sticking up here and there. One patch, right behind and above her ear, is all uniformly shorn.

Kairi probes at it with her fingers and guesses that’s where the burn was. The edges feel a little too straight; someone must have shaved that section, probably when they were trying to heal her.

“And you couldn’t have done the whole side?” she gripes, speaking low even though she’s the only one in the room. Whoever it was did their best, she’s sure. Complaining about a bad haircut seems petty when Cid clearly implied that they had much bigger concerns.

Still, she’s awake now. She ought to do something about the bad haircut. (She’s going to blame it on Sasuke, since it was _his_ spell that did the initial damage. Whoever else was involved was just cleaning up Sasuke’s mess.) Even if she didn’t care—and she _does_ ; it’s such a small, stupid thing to care about, but looking at her reflection starts to _bug her_ and she can’t pry her eyes away—other people will.

Sora will.

Cid didn’t bring any scissors with him, and while there are boxes shoved up into the far corner, Kairi doesn’t feel up to junk-diving in search of scissors that may or may not even be in those boxes. (Let alone sharp enough—she and Selphie tried to give themselves pixie cuts in third grade. The child-friendly scissors did nothing, of course, but when they stole a pair of the older kids’ scissors, Kairi spent nearly seven minutes sawing uselessly at her bangs before Selphie took them and tried them herself, with similarly disappointing results.

They finally lucked out when they went over to Wakka’s house after school and discovered his mom’s kitchen scissors. They also discovered that neither of them could cut a straight line. That marked the one and only time Kairi’s mom banned her from going to Wakka’s house, and also the first time she was grounded. Sora and Riku snuck into her room and offered to cut their bangs in solidarity. It was great.)

So: boxes are not the solution. Thankfully, there _is_ someone in Traverse Town who can fix Kairi’s hair.

She hesitates at the door, though, a guilty thought in the back of her mind that she will _freak everyone out_ if she just disappears on them. There’s no way she’ll be able to make it there and back before Cid and the reinforcements show up. With no other way to leave a note, Kairi does wind up walking up the side of the wall (bonus exercise!) to look in the boxes at the top of the stack.

Luckily, she digs out a notebook and an ancient, almost-dead marker. She only knocks over one box in the search, too. She has to lick the tip of the marker to make it work, but Cid left her enough water bottles to wash out the taste, and there’s enough ink left in the marker to make her note of “Visiting Fairy Godmother -K” legible.

She leaves it nice and noticeable on the table before she leaves.

⁂

The Heartless don’t put up much resistance, but hopping across the floating stones to the Magic House leaves Kairi panting; clearly, she _needs_ more getting-well exercise. The doctor gave Sora a bunch of little things to do with his arm when the cast came off; maybe Aerith will tell her to do similar exercises.

Kairi walks into the house, and the Fairy Godmother gasps. Merlin drops his teacup. It hits the table and stains the tablecloth but doesn’t break.

“You’re _awake_ ,” Merlin squawks, while the Fairy Godmother bustles over to Kairi, hands petting the air around the girl without actually landing on her. “You—you—my spell!”

“Huh?”

“Don’t mind him,” the Fairy Godmother says, shooting a disapproving look his way, eyes pointedly fixed on the growing puddle before they return to scanning Kairi. “He’s quite easy to work up. How are you feeling, dear? Here, have a seat, let’s settle you and have a look, hm? Did you just wake up?”

She gestures with one hand, which didn’t have a wand in it a moment ago; one of Merlin’s chairs jerks into the air and twirls over to Kairi, feet clicking against the stone next to her.

Kairi sits. “I’m okay. I came here for a favor, actually.”

The Fairy Godmother pauses in her head-to-toe examination of Kairi. “Oh?”

After Kairi turned her down on the offer of a warmer outfit, it feels silly, but—actually, now that Kairi’s thinking about that and looking at her lap, she could _really_ use some different clothes. Hers are a little, um. Banged up. And singed. And torn. Kind of stained, too?

Yikes.

“It’s my stupid hair,” she says, hands clenching in her skirt. One of her fingers nearly slides through a _hole_. Ugh. “And these clothes. They’re, uh—I need new ones. Or to fix them, maybe?” A pause. Did that make sense? She groans, curling inward as she tries to unjumble the words and thoughts and feelings. “I, ah—”

Without permission, she bursts into tears.

“Shh,” the Fairy Godmother soothes. She gives really good hugs.

Kairi wants to turn _invisible_. Valefor, nothing could be worse than this. No one’s going to trust her with _anything_. She can hide her face in the Fairy Godmother’s shoulder, but she can’t hide her sobs, and the tears and snot keep coming, endless and mortifying.

Then the door bangs open, and, all the gods in all the worlds, _this_ is the _actual worst_ , because Kairi _recognizes_ the sound of those boots on stone. She holds her breath, waiting for an explosion, but can’t hold back the sniffles.

Leon says, “I’ll be outside,” and leaves, shutting the door quietly.

The Fairy Godmother starts to hum tunelessly, kind of flat. Kairi hiccups through a wet laugh at the idea of a fairy godmother _not_ being perfect at something, and the Fairy Godmother pets her stupid, half-shaved head and says, “There you are. What a wonderful laugh.”

That’s such a silly thing to say—Kairi’s laugh was _pathetic_ —that Kairi laughs again, through the tears. The Fairy Godmother pulls back to beam at her. “Better?”

Kairi nods and tries to wipe her face clean with the bottom of her shirt. The Fairy Godmother sighs at her and, with a flick of her wrist, conjures up a handkerchief.

Kairi blinks. She’s _read_ about those, but never _seen_ one before. It looks too small to wrap around a knight’s arm as a favor. (She, Sora, and Riku used to use whatever they had handy. A lot of favors were repurposed from boat-cleaning rags.)

The Fairy Godmother dabs at her face until the tears fully stop; then, with all the brusqueness of a mother cat, she scrubs at Kairi’s cheeks and nose.

Kairi’s left with a raw face and a floating, dizzy feeling. Dehydration? She should have brought one of the water bottles Cid left her.

“There you are,” the Fairy Godmother says when she’s done, magic whisking the dirty handkerchief away. “You said you feel better now?”

Kairi nods again.

“Good!” And again, the Fairy Godmother beams at her. “Now, Merlin, dear, I believe she could use some tea. Yes?” The look the Fairy Godmother tilts her is full of understanding and acceptance; what should have been a presumption instead seems like mercy, like the Fairy Godmother is trying to help her by not making her ask for it herself, and leaving her the option to turn it down, just in case.

Kairi nods, and drinks the tea when Merlin brings it over. She even manages to say thank you.

“There’s a dear,” the Fairy Godmother says as she sips at it. “Now, finish that and we’ll get you sorted out, how does that sound?”

“Good,” Kairi mumbles.

The Fairy Godmother doesn’t stare at her as she drinks; instead, she leaves Kairi alone, facing stacks of books and the stone wall. She can hear the other two in the room, moving around, but they don’t talk, and Kairi doesn’t feel any need to look over and see what they’re doing.

It’s—nice. She melts into her chair more as she slowly sips her tea. Her body informs her that she’s done a whole lot more moving than it’s used to and could really use this break; her legs, especially, feel sore and overworked.

Her left arm is still numb, but she can hold the teacup just fine, so it still _works_.

The Fairy Godmother comes back over to her right as she finishes the tea and uses magic to float the cup away before Kairi can worry about where to put it.

“Alright. What do you want to start with?”

“My hair,” Kairi says. She straightens her shoulders, lifts her chin. “It’s a mess.”

“Mmm,” the Fairy Godmother neither agrees nor disagrees, but—her eyes flicker over Kairi’s head, and she’s not _blind_. “Well, I’m afraid my magic can’t make your hair grow faster.”

Kairi’s chin starts to wobble, and she sternly forces it still. “Okay.” That’s—okay. She was hoping, but she can change tack. “Can you fix it? It’s all—uneven.” She tugs at one of the long clumps next to the fuzzy section in demonstration.

The Fairy Godmother brightens. “That, I can do, yes.” She raises her hands, one with the wand and one without, and pauses to give Kairi a chance to change her mind.

“Do it.”

One _bibbidi-bobbidi-boo_ later and the Fairy Godmother leads Kairi over to a full-length mirror to have a look.

It’s not…horrible. Her mother would _hate_ it, which, honestly, is a plus.

Now, her hair is parted in one nice, clean line. The left side of her head is all red fuzz, uniformly shaved down with no weird patches. The Fairy Godmother has salvaged some of her bangs and swept them to the right, and she’s even trimmed the ends so they look artful rather than haphazard. The rest of her hair is all neat layers, no uneven or singed patches.

“It will take a while to grow out,” the Fairy Godmother says. Pauses. “If you want it to grow out.”

Kairi runs her hands over her head, marveling at the difference in textures. “I’ll think about it.”

Her mother really will hate it. If.

Kairi swallows. Casts her gaze down. Grimaces. “I need new clothes, too.”

The Fairy Godmother very kindly does not say any version of _I knew it_ or _Finally!_ She just smiles and asks, “What would you like?”

When Kairi, testing, asks for a skirt exactly like the one she has, the Fairy Godmother just nods, smile unwavering. When Kairi pokes at her bandages and asks if she can take them off, the Fairy Godmother glances at them and says, “I’m not sure...”

“Aerith said she’d finished the initial healing,” Merlin calls from the other side of the room; Kairi looks over, but can’t see even the top of his hat, so he must be deeply buried in his books. “She’ll probably want to replace the bandages soon anyway.” But he’s paying enough attention to contribute. Hm.

“In that case,” the Fairy Godmother says, and waves her wand. The bandages unravel.

The bandages. Unravel. Kairi watches her reflection.

Her elbow still looks normal. Above it, though…

The whole knob of her shoulder is shockingly white; it looks like bloodless, dead skin. The scar swoops halfway down her bicep, leaving a curved, red edge where it meets the healthy skin below. The outside of her arm took the brunt of the hit; her underarm is mercifully unscarred, and Kairi tentatively pokes the skin there before she goes to poke the scarred area.

The Fairy Godmother grabs her hand before she can. “Best not,” she says. “The blisters are gone, but you’ll want to keep it as clean as possible.”

Kairi blanches. “Blisters?” Then she shakes her head. She doesn’t want to know. If she managed to sleep through blisters on top of _this_ , she’ll count that as luck and let it go. “Never mind. Uh. Do you have more bandages…?”

Her eyes keep catching on the scar: in her peripheral, in her reflection. When they do, she can’t tear them away for long moments, and each time, she can feel a phantom fire washing over her. And she thought her stupid hair would be the biggest problem!

Her arm can’t feel anything _normal_ ; she’d barely registered her own pokes or Cid’s pat, but the fire that _isn_ _’t even happening anymore_ , that she can feel. And meanwhile, her shoulder looks _dead_. It’s creepy.

The Fairy Godmother magics her up some new bandages, and smooths something sticky and metallic-smelling over her scar before applying those bandages. Kairi tests her range of motion once that’s done and makes a face.

Now that she’s seen it, she can connect the numb feeling and the way her arm doesn’t move like it used to. Some of that is the bandages, but some of that is scar tissue.

More than ever, she wishes Riku was here. Ninja _must_ have some tricks to working with inconvenient scars. Some kind of special healing or _something_.

But he isn’t here, so Kairi’s just going to have to tough it out and compensate. At least it’s her left arm; she mostly uses that for handsprings and magic, and she tested out magic earlier, on her way to this house. Her spells work fine, scar or no.

She shouldn’t attempt a flip any time soon, though.

Her reflection grimaces back at her, white bandages covering the white scar. Kairi watches the Fairy Godmother step to her side and raise her hands, an open question on her face. Kairi nods.

Her purple skirt stays the same, mostly: the scalloped edge stays, hemline intact and just as short as always, but the flower pattern has been replaced with hearts. Her new tank top is white, but this one is shimmery, with iridescent stars that catch the light as she moves. Her sneakers, long since turned an indistinct greyish-cream, are once again bright white, now with unsnapped pink-and-purple laces; the black grips underneath are brand new, but don’t squeak even a little as Kairi pivots and spins on them.

The shorts beneath her skirt don’t chafe. The black belt around her waist fits perfectly, with an extra belt loop on the right that Kairi fingers, confused, until the Fairy Godmother smiles and says, “For your keyblade.”

Kairi’s eyes go wide. A thought brings Destiny’s Embrace to her hand, and when she dismisses it just as quickly, the keychain stays in her palm.

She threads it through the belt loop; she doesn’t have to tie it there or anything, it attaches to itself in one smooth, unbroken chain, dangling just above her pocket.

“Could you always do that?” she mumbles to it. She and Sora have been tucking the not-in-use keychains into spare pockets and pouches. If they were handy like this, though, could she switch keyblades in the middle of a fight? Would the other keychain take the vacated spot on her belt, or would she have to waste time putting it in her pocket and then worrying about it falling out?

She and Sora haven’t managed to lose a keychain yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

The Fairy Godmother clears her throat. Kairi jerks, straightens, tries to banish the heat from her face.

“I know you said you’re not cold,” she says, a glimmer in her eye, “but if that ever changes, I want you to have this.”

She hands Kairi a bundle of pink fabric that unfolds into a jacket, all solid pink except for a gold star on the back. Unreasonably and irrevocably, Kairi falls in love.

She shrugs it on. It fits her _perfectly_.

(It completely hides her bandages, the arm underneath.)

“Thank you,” she says, throwing her arms around the Fairy Godmother, disregarding how her scar protests the movement, disregarding the stiffness of her muscles and the heat behind her eyes. “ _Thank you_.”

“Oh, you’re very welcome,” the Fairy Godmother says, returning the hug.

Seriously, she is _the best hugger_ , and Kairi includes _Sora_ in that.

⁂

Reality intrudes, rude as always, when Leon decides that they’ve taken far too long and comes back in. He looks relieved to find Kairi no longer crying, and if his eyes drag a little slower over her injured arm than the rest of her, well, she can tell herself it’s just that he’s jealous. His jacket may be all rugged and warm, but hers has a _star_. Clearly superior.

That’s her story and she’s sticking to it.

Leon escorts her to Cid’s shop, and the promised lecture never materializes. Kairi keeps her eyes pointed forward, the better to anticipate Heartless ambushes, but if Leon’s mulling over how he wants to yell at her, he gives no sign of it.

If Cid hadn’t said anything, Kairi would think they were fine. Leon doesn’t even seem more tense than usual.

But Cid did warn her, so Kairi isn’t surprised when they reach the safety of the First District and Leon just stops.

His expression is, if anything, even blanker than usual. A chill runs through Kairi. Some people are loud in their anger and others are quiet; Leon’s, so far, seems…still.

Riptides look still from the beach. They look calm, and peaceful, and safe.

They’re not.

“When I was about your age,” he says, “I met a girl.” His eyes catch Kairi’s, hold them. His voice stays steady and solemn, and the tone promises no happy ending. “She was just as young, and she acted her age. But she could be serious when she needed to be. When something was important to her.”

A pause; Kairi watches Leon swallow, the first sign of emotion she’s seen from him yet.

“Everyone liked her. She made friends easily. I didn’t.” Another pause. Kairi can _feel_ all the memories Leon is choosing not to share; even the First District isn’t big enough to hold them all. “When the Heartless attacked, I went looking for her. She worked in the castle; that’s where all the Heartless were coming from.

“I thought I could protect her. I didn’t think about anything else—the only thing I cared about was getting to her. When Cid found me, I almost took his eye out, trying to get away.” Leon runs his thumb over the scar on his nose. “I’d just gotten this—he says I barreled past him, blood all over my face, and he had to chase me down. I don’t remember that. All I remember is him grabbing me, and me trying to get away, while Heartless were pouring through the halls all around us.”

Another pause. Kairi can picture it: like Destiny Islands, but instead of the darkness crawling over the open beaches, it would’ve swarmed through stone hallways. She’s seen Heartless crawl over one another to try to get to a beating heart first. She knows what it’s like, to face that swarm with no clue what they were.

No clue, and no keyblade. Leon and the others were lucky to have survived.

“Getting me onto the gummi ship cost Cid and the others time,” Leon says. “I could have been the reason they all died. At first, I wished he’d left me behind. It didn’t matter that I was alive, because—she wasn’t, anymore.”

Kairi’s breath catches and her eyes water. “Leon…”

He shakes his head. “That was…a long time ago.” Another pause. “For me.”

Kairi folds her arms over her chest. She manages not to hunch, not to fidget or shift her weight under Leon’s scrutiny.

“One of the things that helped,” he says, with an air of finality, “was realizing that she wouldn’t want that for me.”

With that, Leon turns and walks to Cid’s shop. He doesn’t move any slower or faster than he did on the walk over, no slower or faster than he usually walks. His stride is even, the line of his back straight, the red wings on the back of his jacket smooth, as if he’s no more tense than he ever is.

Kairi gets it. She isn’t an idiot.

It would’ve been nicer of him to just yell at her.

⁂

Kairi wants to head out after Sora and the others. This turns out to be less of an issue than she’d thought.

In the few minutes she takes to form the outline of a plan, she really thought the sticking point would be the lack of a gummi ship. That, according to Cid, is no obstacle; he has one nearly completed, and enough parts to get it running by the end of the day.

“’S for you, anyway,” he says, and Kairi has to choke back tears _again_.

No, the main problem is that everyone wants to go with her. Everyone except Leon, who looks at the others with an air of resignation as they argue amongst themselves.

“—moogles can run the store, it ain’t a big deal, and ’sides, who’s gonna look after Leon if you leave? It’s better if I—”

“You are more than capable of looking after Leon, _especially_ if you don’t have to worry about the store on top of that; and Yuffie will be here to help, of course—”

“ _Not_ of course! I can go with her, and then Cid can deal with his store and Aerith can deal with Leon and it all works out! I’m the only one here without a _real_ job anyway—”

“—because you’re too young—” “It ain’t safe and it ain’t happening,” Aerith and Cid say over one another.

Yuffie pouts. “’M older than Kairi,” she mutters, kicking her feet. “I don’t wanna get stuck looking after Broody McSulkpants.”

Aerith and Cid ignore her. “Kairi should have a healer with her, in case she re-injures her arm.”

“If she has a stronger fighter with her, the arm won’t get hurt again, so…”

“If that’s the case,” Kairi cuts in, “isn’t Leon the strongest fighter here?”

A pause, as the others absorb this question and turn their stares from each other to Kairi to Leon.

Who shakes his head. “Someone needs to keep Traverse Town in one piece.”

Yuffie nods, mumbling, _yeah, fair_ , while Aerith looks irritated and Cid skeptical.

“You think yer the _only_ one who can keep Traverse Town going?”

Leon snorts. “You want to be in charge?” Cid jerks back, expression gone panicked, and Leon smirks. “That’s what I thought.” Then he tips his head at Aerith. “And you’re planning on sneaking onto her ship regardless of what anyone says.”

Aerith’s expression flattens for a moment before she pulls a confused smile over it, and Kairi’s mouth drops open. All this time, she thought Aerith was the responsible one, but it turns out that Aerith’s the _secretly sneaky_ one, and _Leon_ is the responsible adult in the room.

Of course, the woman denies that she has any such plans, but Kairi _knows_ that expression. That expression was “caught and mad about it.” Aerith isn’t even _guilty_ , or _embarrassed_.

Cid also gives Aerith a not-buying-it look, then sighs. “We could _both_ go.”

On the one hand: would that be much different than traveling with Donald and Goofy? Aerith knows magic, and Cid claims he’s a better fighter than her, so their skills are probably close to what Kairi’s used to.

On the other hand: Kairi kind of…doesn’t want to bring two more people along.

She turns to Leon, hoping he’ll tell them they can’t, but he isn’t looking at any of them. He has his eyes closed, fingers pinched around the bridge of his nose. “One world,” he says, and unlike Aerith and Cid, this isn’t a negotiation. “If the others aren’t there, come back here. We’ll figure something out. Maybe those chipmunks can get in contact with them.”

Cid mutters darkly about flighty rodents with nonexistent attention spans, but Aerith beams. “Wonderful! I’ll grab my staff. And my jacket.”

“Hey, hey, wait, does this mean I get to go, too?” Yuffie asks.

“No,” all three of the adults shut her down, none of them gentle about it.

“Aww…”

With Aerith and Cid bustling around to get the gummi ship and their supplies ready, Kairi takes the opportunity to swoop in on the disappointed and sulky Yuffie.

“If it was up to me,” she says, and doesn’t finish the thought so it isn’t technically a lie.

Yuffie sniffs but gives her a small smile. “That’s nice of you. I should’ve known; they _never_ let me do anything fun.”

“They’re grown-ups,” Kairi says, in her best commiserating tone. “But, um, I was hoping I could ask you for a favor, since you can’t come with me?”

Yuffie perks up _right_ away, and when Kairi explains what she wants, Yuffie transforms into a tornado of ninja supply procurement.

Kairi very shortly has a thigh harness, similar to what Sasuke had, stocked with throwing knives. (Yuffie is responsible enough to take Kairi out behind Cid’s shop and make her demonstrate her knife throwing ability before handing those over. Kairi’s aim isn’t wonderful, but she gets the knives into the wooden beam Yuffie marks as the target without chopping off any fingers.

It turns out, her newly injured arm is important for balance reasons, and her injury makes her already-not-great aim worse. Good enough to pass muster for Yuffie, but clearly, Kairi needs to practice more than just her hand seals and chakra exercises.)

Yuffie also digs up some belt-pouches, into which they stuff a handful of smoke bombs (“Careful with those! If you accidentally set them off on yourself, Cid will _never_ let you live it down”), two flash-bang grenades, and as many potions and ethers as Yuffie can wheedle out of Cid for free.

Before he lets them leave the shop with their dubiously-gotten gains, Cid hauls Kairi over to the counter and drops a couple of black rings into her hand, followed shortly by a length of metal links.

Kairi eyes the last one. There are eight little shields strung together, made of silver. Or steel? One end has a little circular piece, like it can attach to something else; the other has a charm attached to the end, with two little crescents pressed together, facing outward.

“Pretty,” she says, slow and confused.

Cid snorts. “It’s got protection magic on it. Same as those rings. Put ‘em on and don’t take ‘em off. _Especially_ those rings.”

Yuffie peers over Kairi’s shoulder; the way she drapes herself and hooks her chin over Kairi’s shoulder is unnecessary, but almost like a hug. Kairi leans into her and holds the jewelry up for inspection.

With a whistle, Yuffie reaches out to poke one of the rings—and gets smacked by Cid. “Ow! Hey! I was just checking, I wasn’t gonna take them!”

Cid grumbles and shoots her a narrow-eyed look, deeply suspicious.

Yuffie sticks her tongue out at him, then pointedly looks away, shifting so she can talk to Kairi without breathing on her face. (Kairi startles at the sudden loss of warmth.) “Those rings are charmed to protect against the darkness. Really useful for you!”

“Won’t help if you take a hit point-blank,” Cid says, “so don’t get any ideas.”

Kairi flushes. “That was a one-time thing. It won’t happen again.”

She hopes.

Cid looks doubtful, but lets it go; he locks up the shop behind them so he can get the ship ready, whatever that entails. Yuffie, meanwhile, drags Kairi off to see Leon (and beg some more last-minute supplies from him).

⁂

Leon makes them all eat dinner (in the little room Kairi woke up in) before they leave; Kairi expected that push from Aerith, but the woman turns up late, with a red jacket that has seen _many_ better days, a long, steel staff, and a flush to her cheeks.

“I forgot where I put it,” is the only explanation she gives. Leon raises a skeptical eyebrow, but doesn’t press, so Kairi leaves that alone, too.

Cid also has a weapon Kairi’s never seen him use and a jacket she’s never seen him wear: his jacket is blue, and while at first she thinks he also has a staff, when he leans it against the wall, the light catches on a nasty-looking point.

So Aerith has a staff (and magic) and Cid has a spear (and maybe magic?), and all three of them have new jackets. Or. Well. Cid’s looks just as beat-up as Aerith’s, actually; if he told her he’d worn it when their world was destroyed, she’d believe it.

Yuffie sulks the whole meal through, but even so, it’s a nice moment. Kairi hasn’t had much opportunity to just enjoy a meal with other people since…

…Yeah. It’s nice.

Cid leaves early to prep the ship, and the rest of the group follows once they finish. Kairi feels bad leaving the dishes, but Leon waves her off when she offers to wash them.

“If you make Aerith wait any longer, she will leave without you,” he says.

Aerith pouts at him. Kairi’s never seen an adult do that, and stares.

“I’m not _that_ bad,” the woman says. “I’m just excited. I haven’t seen any other worlds. Wouldn’t you be excited?”

“No,” Leon says. “That’s why I’m not going.”

Yuffie puts in, “ _I_ _’d_ be excited!” Yuffie is roundly ignored. (Kairi pats her shoulder and earns a smile for the gesture.)

“Take care of yourselves,” Leon says when they get close to the First District gate. “No risks. It’s better to come back here and wait than get yourselves in trouble. You only have one keyblade wielder with you.” And he turns a look on Kairi that instantly calls to mind the story he told her.

As soon as he looks away, Kairi lets herself shiver. His eyes were so intense for that moment. Intense, and worried.

He’d probably be happy—or as close as he gets—if they all stayed put. Sending a group out gives Kairi more protection than if she went by herself, but it won’t be as safe as if she just stayed here. But Leon never even tried to make her…

He just told her that story. Kairi swallows, and resolves not to leap into any fights. Even if she does have Aerith and Cid for backup.

Then they push into the First District, and all Kairi’s thoughts and promises are forcibly derailed by the _gorgeous_ sight.

Neatly packed between the lampposts, the ship is at least twice as long as Donald and Goofy’s, and a hundred times sleeker. Done up in blue with purple and green accents, a cockpit set far back, twin scan gummis on either side and two mirrored pairs of cannons pointing straight ahead.

“The inside ain’t pretty,” Cid calls, coming around from the far side and eyeing the ship with dissatisfaction. “Meant to add a whole—well. There’s a big empty room below the cockpit. I threw some sleeping bags and other crap down there.”

Which means they won’t be all on top of each other. Kairi _loves_ this ship. She turns to Cid with her most serious expression. “Cid?”

“Hm? What’s the matter?”

“Cid.” She _really_ needs his complete attention.

He looks nonplussed, but he’s not distracted anymore. “What?”

“I get to _keep_ this ship, even after we find Sora again. Right?” She leans forward. “ _Please_? I _need_ to keep this ship. I will _pay_ you for it.”

He snorts, patting her head. “Guess you like it then, huh?”

“ _Cid_.”

With a laugh and a hair ruffle—he keeps his hand on the unshaved side of her head, but whether that’s because the other side is weird or just not fun to mess up, Kairi’s not sure—he drops his hand and heads over to the cockpit, hoisting himself up onto the nose of the ship. Aerith has already climbed up and knelt in front of one of the cannons, examining it.

“That’s not an answer, Cid!”

“C’mon kid, let’s go find yer friends.”

“That’s _still not an answer_!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been sitting on this chapter since lockdown began, for which I apologize; I know I left all the characters in bad spots, but _I_ knew they were gonna be okay! (Eventually.)
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has waited, and extra thanks to everyone who left comments or kudos on the last chapter or over that hiatus. I have no intentions of abandoning this story, but knowing that other people are interested really does help.
> 
> I don't have an ETA for the next chapter and I can't promise a stable posting schedule. I'm doing okay, but the lockdown and...everything...has not been wonderful in terms of motivation. My goal is to post the next chapter once I've finished the one after, and I'm shooting for early December, but we'll see. As a reminder, I do have a plan for where all the plot threads are going! 
> 
> Happy Thanksgiving, to those celebrating, whatever that looks like for you this year. In a taxing year, one of the things I'm most grateful for is fandom. Stay safe, everyone, and take care of yourselves. 💖💖


	11. Into the Belly of the Whale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kairi (plus field trip chaperones) encounters a rare gummi space phenomenon, meets a long-awaited cameo, and uses a new power. It's not a bad trip, except for all that parts that suck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S STILL 2020 WHERE I AM, so in the spirit of "start the new year off the way you want it to continue," I am posting this!
> 
> Content notes: Suicide mention (referencing Heartless, not human characters); ongoing injury recovery; KH-canon typical violence; a lot of gross Monstro-related imagery -- I didn't think it was that bad, but when I described it to someone else there was a lot of "okay okay OKAY please be done talking about this," so, uh, use your best judgment if that kind of thing is upsetting to you! I am happy to provide further details or summarize if you need to give it a pass.

Cid, with great reluctance, allows Kairi the copilot seat in front of the weapon controls. He banishes Aerith to one of three seats behind the copilots, and every time she tries to get up or lean forward and offer suggestions, he scowls and snaps at her to sit back and belt up.

“I can help!”

Cid grunts. Kairi bites her lip to not giggle.

“Yer aim is sh—crap with guns,” Cid says, censoring himself with a quick look at Kairi. “At least girlie here has experience shooting Heartless.”

“I have experience flying, too,” Kairi says, “if you want to switch.”

Cid barely dignifies that with a sneer, and Kairi realizes that she has zero chance of flying her new ship. (No matter that Cid won’t agree; Kairi will _steal it_ if she must. This ship is _hers_.) At least, zero chance while Cid is conscious. He might get tired on the flight back…

The cannons are _so powerful_. One pair blasts _lasers_! Kairi has a lot of fun whooping and shrieking as she disintegrates Heartless left, right, and center.

To be fair, Cid is a _way_ better pilot than anyone Kairi knows, including herself. The ship doesn’t take a single hit. Cid knows just how to dodge and spin, and the few times he jerks the ship out of harm’s way, he does it with a minimum of turbulence and a lot of under-his-breath cursing.

(Kairi is learning all sorts of things.)

Aerith, meanwhile, gets bored twelve minutes in and starts polishing her staff, humming random tunes to herself. One is a bouncy, joyful melody that sticks in Kairi’s head and refuses to leave.

Cid navigates them to the nearest warp-point and tells them to brace for the passage.

Flying through it is…weird. It isn’t quite like spinning, isn’t quite like body-flicker, but some cousin of both sensations: vertigo and disorientation carry her over the warp threshold, and she takes a few breaths on the other side to regain her equilibrium. Cid recovers faster, but he doesn’t move the ship until both Aerith and Kairi say they’re fine.

“Right,” he says, once he’s satisfied everyone’s recovered. “Now what?”

Kairi blinks at him. It’s only when Aerith also turns an expectant look on her that Kairi realizes: she’s the only one here who’s gone through gummi space to other worlds.

She’s the only one who’s _gone to other worlds_. Besides that time their world was destroyed and Cid got the survivors to Traverse Town, years ago.

She’d thought the two adults would just…make all the decisions. She hadn’t been happy about it, but she’d figured it was temporary and she could put up with it until she got back to Sora. She had assumed Cid and Aerith were hijacking her plan.

Apparently, they’ve been under the impression that they’re freeloading. Stowaways, not mutineers.

Kairi straightens her shoulders. If she’s in charge, then she ought to look like she’s in charge. (She wishes she’d known; she could’ve talked the Fairy Godmother into making her a _magical captain_ _’s hat_. With a _giant_ feather. Oh well. Next time.)

“Pull up navigation,” she says, because those controls are on Cid’s section of the dashboard. When he does (shooting Aerith an amused look that Kairi notices and decides to ignore, thank you very much), Kairi surveys the map with her most serious expression.

“Sora went to one of these two worlds,” she says, gesturing. “They’re both about the same distance apart, though, so I’m not sure which he would have chosen.”

A glance out the front window tells her that one world lies past what looks like several worlds’ worth of sand, while the other must be nestled somewhere among a series of floating islands, each four or five times the size of her ship, most spilling water and vegetation over their sides.

Aerith makes a small, encouraging noise. “Are there any clues? Cid, can we contact Sora, or see which way his ship went?”

“Nah, scanners are just for Heartless. Could probably whip something up, but—I’d need a week at _least_ , plus parts and my tools.”

“And contact’s a no?” Kairi asks, since Cid seems to get distracted by the whole _gummi ship scanner_ idea. (It must not have been particularly important, before people with keyblades started traveling around—first this King Mickey, now Sora and Kairi. After all, what’s the point of leaving the relative safety of the world you’re on? And if there are only a small handful of ships out in space to begin with, why waste the space and weight lugging a ship-scanner around when Heartless are always a clear and present danger?)

Cid grunts. “Not ‘less we get a visual. Ships have comm units, but I didn’t install one in Sora’s before they took off.”

“I thought you could reach him from Traverse Town?” Aerith asks. “Why can’t we do that here?”

Cid sniffs. “The comm system in Traverse Town ain’t built to _move_. It’s big ‘n heavy, and there’s no way it’d fit without dropping us outta the sky. _Not to mention_ that it ain’t built to move, and movin’ it would just be _askin_ ’ for trouble.” He shakes his head. “Nah, won’t work this time. When we see ‘im, though, we can establish a link. Won’t work over half of gummi space, but once we get close…”

Kairi’s already halfway rethinking her plan to steal the ship, if it means she won’t be able to talk to the others while traveling. That sounds lonely. And dangerous. And lonely. “ _Will_ you be able to put one of those things in Sora’s ship? When we do see him again, I mean.”

“’Course.” Cid shoots her a look of mock offense. “Who d’ya think yer talkin’ to? I’m _Cid Highwind_ , I can stick a d—a, uh, a comm unit in a ship. Even if it is an antiquated piece of junk.”

Kairi blinks. Blinks again. “Is our ship…not good?” It’d seemed fine when she piloted it!

The look Cid gives her is full of exaggerated pity. “It’s…fine.”

Aerith snorts. “The first time you all left, Cid came and ranted about how you were all going to fall out of the sky.”

“I did not!”

“You did _so_ ,” Aerith says. “It was adorable. Kairi, don’t worry about it, Cid’s just a snob. Your ship is perfectly functional.”

But Cid’s ship—or, rather, Kairi’s ship-to-be—flies so much more smoothly. And packs a _lot_ more firepower. Some of the maneuverability comes from Cid’s skill as a pilot, but some of it might just be the ship.

It makes sense: a good portion of Kairi’s history education has focused on ship innovation over the years. Sure, a longboat _can_ get you across huge distances—but if you run into pirates with cannons, you’re going to wish for multiple sets of sails to take you far away from those pirates.

(And if you’re in a dinghy, you’ll be wishing for that longboat well before you reach the pirates.)

“Maybe you can upgrade it, when we all get back to Traverse Town?”

“Sure,” Cid says, and the light in his eyes tells her that upgrade is not a strong enough word for what he’ll do if he has his way. Kairi makes a note to herself to keep Donald out of his way; it’ll be for the best, but Donald probably won’t appreciate anyone tinkering with “the King’s ship.”

“Great!” Aerith says. “Now that that’s settled… Since we can’t ask Sora which way he went, and we don’t have any other clues, we’ll have to guess. A fifty-fifty chance isn’t bad. Kairi, I think you should pick.”

Kairi eyes the two directions Sora might have gone in. She can’t say for sure, but… The floating islands remind her of home, a bit. The lushness of the greenery on them, the way the water twinkles in reflected starlight.

“That way,” she says, and Cid starts toward the world the scanners say is _Atlantica_.

They skirmish with a few Heartless, including a new kind of enemy ship that tries to clamp onto theirs. Cid keeps it from grabbing them, and when Kairi fires at them with her lasers, they _explode_.

The first time that happens, she jerks back in her seat. “Did that Heartless just—suicide?” she asks, staring.

From behind her, Aerith lays a hand on her shoulder. “Some of them do. Without hearts, they don’t…really have much to live for. If they’re intelligent enough to even think about that, I suppose.”

Ugh. Right when Kairi thinks she has a handle on how awful the Heartless are, there’s some deeper level of horror. They eat worlds and hearts, and they throw their lives away and…

The sooner they find a way to get rid of the Heartless, the better.

Just after one of those encounters, a ping from the scanner in front of Kairi gets everyone’s attention. It isn’t an enemy ping, exactly—more like the warning the scanner gives before the pilot runs into something big.

Kairi, Sora, and even Donald have all run into rocks, boulders, particularly large trees… The other ship would deploy shielding right before impact, which usually had the side-effect of forcing the ship away from whatever it ran into. Kairi’s not sure what Cid’s ship will do, because he hasn’t yet even gotten close to crashing into any bits of scenery.

“We’re not close to anything, though,” Kairi says, eyeing the view in front of her and then looking back at the scanner.

There aren’t even asteroids nearby.

“Is it behind us?” Aerith asks.

“We didn’t pass anything that big and _moving_ ,” Cid mutters, but he turns the gummi ship around—

Right in time for a dark void to slam closed around them. Warm yellow lights flick on, keeping the cabin illuminated despite the darkness outside.

“Buckle up!” Cid says, before pushing the controls forward and _ramming_ the long nose of the ship into the dark wall in front of them.

Everything in the cabin shudders at the impact and an alarm on the dashboard begins beeping urgently, but the wall doesn’t reopen.

Cid growls at it and turns to Kairi. “Try shooting it.”

Neither lasers nor cannons have any effect; the blowback from both sends the ship backward at an angle, crashing into something.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Aerith says. “We should check things out before we do any real damage.”

“Too late.” Cid swipes at something and a blueprint of the gummi ship takes over part of the windshield. If they could see whatever was outside, that might matter. “Looks like a couple parts got damaged.” The nose, one of the lasers, and a few gummi blocks on the back of the ship are lit up in various shades of yellow and orange. “It’s fixable, at least.”

“Well, try not to break anything _else_. While you’re fixing that, Kairi and I will look around.”

“Now wait just a—”

But Aerith’s already slipped out of her seatbelt and hit the button to open the cockpit. Just like on Sora’s ship, the whole top lifts, revealing the outside world.

Air as warm and thick as soup pours in, chasing out the cool, filtered air of the ship. Kairi’s no stranger to humidity, but where the island air always carried the heavy smells of ocean, jasmine, and plumeria, this air sits even more heavily and smells sour, only vaguely salty, with a hint of something repugnant that wrinkles Kairi’s nose. She can’t place what it is, but she’d like to stop smelling it.

Too bad she doesn’t have anything to block her nose—and even if she did, would she really want to put it on with the air as thick and warm as it is? She even considers taking her jacket off, but then that would expose her bandaged arm…

Aerith doesn’t have any such qualm, shrugging out of her jacket and tossing it over her seat. Even Cid takes his off, though he wraps it around his waist before he kneels down to take apart the dashboard.

While he pulls out and mutters darkly at clumps of wires, Aerith climbs out of the cockpit and onto the nose of the ship. Kairi follows her, eyeing their surroundings.

The world outside looks very…fleshy. Very pink, with rough wooden structures strewn about. In front of the ship, the wall Kairi fired at and Cid rammed into looks like two rows of giant teeth.

…Either someone went to a lot of effort to make those _look_ real, or else they got gobbled. By something _alive_.

A loud rushing fills the preposterously large cavern they’ve landed in, which she would like to call a breeze. Not breathing. Because she would really, _really_ like to have not been swallowed by something with teeth _that big_.

The health unit all the kids had to sit through last year was sixty percent pure distilled embarrassment, but some of the non-embarrassing forty percent concerned the digestive system and eating healthy. Kairi isn’t the best student, but she paid enough attention to have a basic idea of what the digestive process involves.

It does not involve many opportunities for food to escape.

Also, if those are the _teeth_ , they’re in the _mouth_ , and if that mouth opens, what’s outside is gummi space. Wide, unbreathable gummi space.

“Wow. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Aerith says, sounding remarkably chipper for someone whose first gummi ship experience ended in _getting eaten_. (Wait, no. Second experience. Kairi’s not sure she would call this an upgrade.) “Have you seen anything like this?”

Kairi has never been eaten by any worlds she’s visited before, no. “Not really. But every world is unique. Maybe we should try…looking around?”

She doesn’t want to move away from the ship and the exit, but those teeth seem solidly clenched, and a worrisome little voice in the back of her head says, _What if Sora_ _’s here somewhere? What if Sora got eaten by this monster first?_

Could it have already digested—but no, surely it couldn’t digest a gummi ship. It seems to not be able to process wood, based on how much she sees strewn about, and gummi blocks, despite their name, can’t be any more edible than wood. As long as Sora stayed in his ship, he’s fine, even if he did get swallowed first.

Why isn’t _she_ in the ship again?

“Kairi, come on! Let’s go exploring!”

That’s why. So much for her being in charge.

Kairi takes a deep breath. She can do this. She’s fought all kinds of Heartless, survived not one but _two_ worlds being destroyed around her, and made it back to her body all the way from the Final World. So what if she’s inside some giant monster’s body? She can handle this.

She and Aerith will find a way out—or, really, a way to make the monster let them out—and Cid will fix up the ship, and if Sora’s somewhere around here, she’ll find him and Donald and Goofy. Everything will be fine.

She’ll make _sure_ everything will be fine, but to do that, she needs to get moving.

“Coming!”

She follows Aerith into a water-filled basin. Well. It has the consistency of water—ocean water, in fact, the familiar brine nearly bringing tears to Kairi’s eyes.

It does _not_ , thank Valefor, have the consistency of spit.

If those really are teeth over there, this must be the monster’s mouth, but Kairi can’t find a tongue. Are they underneath it? She looks up; the ceiling is very, very high above them, and moving no more than the walls or the floor.

Which is to say, everything pulses almost-but-not-quite in time with the rushing sound, but if that’s the tongue up there, it’s a very _still_ tongue, and the monster must be _humongous_ to have this much space beneath its tongue. Or else that’s the roof of its mouth, and Kairi has to wonder what kind of monster has _teeth_ but no _tongue_.

Most of the biology she’s learned has been about humans or fish, and she’s…fairly sure fish have tongues? The ones with mouths do, anyway. She thinks.

She was not a _great_ biology student, okay. Kind of regretting that now, to be honest.

They might not be in a fish at all, brine or no. They might be inside a _Heartless_. Although…wouldn’t the inside of a Heartless just be more darkness? From the way they bleed smoke when hit, she guesses they don’t have normal insides for hapless ships to crash into. So…they probably aren’t inside a Heartless. Kairi isn’t ruling “fish” out yet, though.

Around a wooden platform that Kairi would climb if its structural integrity pinged as more than “dubious,” they find half a regular, wood-and-all ship, with the munched side butting up against the monster’s mouth. The surviving half the ship looks okay, though, which tells Kairi two things:

One, there are probably other people here.

Two, whatever else is happening in this monster, it isn’t moving around or chewing so much that their lives are in immediate danger. The ship was broken right around where the mast would be, but it wasn’t crushed. The rest of the wooden structures already point to a certain amount of safety, but this clinches it. The ship is intact enough to be recognizably a ship.

Kairi still doesn’t want to find the monster’s stomach, but she unclenches her jaw, lets her shoulders loosen a bit as she outpaces Aerith to the ship.

(No self-respecting Islander would lose a swimming contest to someone from a city, and never mind that Traverse Town is nothing like Luca. Luca has beaches. Traverse Town barely has a _pond_. Aerith is doing slightly better than doggy-paddling, but only slightly.)

She pulls herself up the side of it—too many warped boards for it to really be ocean-safe, but that’s probably from the moisture in the air. If all this wood stays in all this damp, the fish-monster’s going to have a mold problem. Given its size, that has a better chance of killing it than any hunter.

Above her head as she climbs, she hears three voices—the first familiar, but not one she can place. High, child-like, as opposed to the second, accented, a man’s voice but not as deep as some Kairi’s heard, and the third, a girl’s voice, assertive in a way Kairi doesn’t often hear. When she pulls herself over the edge, she puts faces to the voices.

The child’s voice comes from a child-sized puppet she is _sure_ she’s met before (she wouldn’t forget that!), though the name escapes her. The man is gray-haired and bent-backed, wearing thick glasses and an expression of surprise melting quickly into concern. The girl is—

The girl is Sakura Haruno, and Kairi would recognize her even without the recent confrontation with Sasuke jogging her memory. Pink hair, cut a whole lot shorter than the one photo Kairi saw. Green eyes beneath a bare forehead. No cloak on her—too hot and humid for that. Red sleeveless tunic, dark belt sporting far too many pouches for Kairi’s comfort (including a few she recognizes as weapon holsters), black knee-length pants, ninja sandals. She has one hand on her hip and the other wrapped around a staff that gives Kairi _bad vibes_.

Purple-fireball-before-she-passed-out bad vibes.

Sakura’s expression doesn’t have any of Sasuke’s indifference; if anything, Sakura looks annoyed, though not _angry_. “More people?” she says, in a tone bordering on whining.

“Oh!” the puppet says, staring off behind Kairi. “Miss Aerith!”

“Pinocchio,” Aerith says, a smile in her voice. “You left without any warning. I was worried!”

Pinocchio ducks his head and shuffles in place, the very picture of contrition. “I’m sorry, Miss Aerith. I went looking for my dad, and…I guess I forgot to say goodbye.”

Aerith steps up beside Kairi, and yep, that’s a smile alright. Even Sakura seems to relax at the sheer force of Aerith’s goodwill. “Apology accepted. Why don’t you introduce us, since you know everyone?”

Pinocchio brightens at either the easy acceptance, the task, or both. “Right! Miss Aerith, this is my dad! And this is my friend, Sakura! Dad, Sakura, this is Miss Aerith, she visited me lots, she always has the best flowers and stories! And this is her friend, um…”

“Kairi,” she introduces herself, waving a little so she doesn’t have to offer Sakura her hand.

“My name is Geppetto,” Pinocchio’s dad says, patting the puppet’s head with obvious fondness. “Thank you for looking after my boy. He can be quite a handful.”

“ _Dad_ …”

If Kairi hadn’t kept her attention firmly on Sakura through the introductions, she would have missed the narrow-eyed frown the girl wipes off her face when Aerith turns to her. It’s replaced by a polite smile, brow smoothed over and hands held loose at her sides.

“Did you two get eaten, too?” Sakura asks, tone full of sympathy.

“Well, we’re here,” Kairi says.

Sakura nods, eyes flicking from Kairi to Aerith to the way they came, eyebrows rising in an unspoken question.

Aerith answers, a smile still firmly planted on her face, “We came in a ship. Our friend is repairing it right now.”

Kairi would have liked Sakura to _not_ know they have a third person, but honestly, it’s hard to slip things past ninja. She’s sure Riku’s uncle caught on to a lot more than he let them realize; for that matter, it’s gotten harder to fool Riku himself ever since he left for Konoha, and Riku made it clear that the other ninja his age were _far_ better than him.

He didn’t talk about Sakura much, but she tutored him, Kairi knows that much.

Sakura’s eyes go wide at “ship,” and Kairi tries not to brace herself too obviously. Can Sakura tell from the way she’s standing that Kairi’s ready for a fight?

(Well. As ready as she can be.)

But whatever Sakura’s thinking, it isn’t what Kairi expects. Instead, she asks, “You came in on a ship? And it’s still intact?”

“Mmhm.” Aerith tips her head in the direction of said ship. “It’s a bit banged up, but we should be able to fly out of here. Assuming we can get this thing’s mouth open, I suppose.” She makes a show of looking all around at the cavern around them. “This thing must be _huge_. I don’t suppose you have a giant pepper shaker, Geppetto?”

Her eyes are dancing, but she also has such an air of sincerity, Kairi needs a few moments to decide whether she’s joking. Geppetto and Sakura look just as taken aback.

Pinocchio, with equal sincerity, says, “I _wish_ we had a giant pepper shaker! Or even a feather!” He pauses. “Can you tickle someone into sneezing from inside their mouth?”

Aerith looks delighted, even as she pretends to consider this. (Or maybe she really _is_ considering it…?) “Hm… I think that would work, although I’ve never tried it. But the inside of the mouth _is_ sensitive, especially at the top and in the back, so maybe if we tickled it?” She looks around, then points. “That looks like a good spot.”

Everyone looks; sure enough, there’s some kind of opening and a ledge toward the back of the monster’s mouth. Kairi doesn’t really want to walk up the sides of it (they look _gooshy_ ), but it should be doable.

“What do you mean, _tickle_?” she asks, because tickling usually involves fingers, and she _definitely_ doesn’t want to try _touching_ the wall. And anyway, she’s so small, would the monster even feel it? It would be like if she ate an ant.

…Actually, she _would_ notice an ant walking around on the inside of her mouth, and it _would_ feel ticklish, and that is _the grossest thing ever_ , ugh. She’s not sure if she’d sneeze, but she _would_ try to spit it out, so maybe this will work.

Sora owes Kairi _so much_ for dealing with all this. Even if he isn’t lost somewhere in here, he owes Kairi, because she’s only in a position of _contemplating tickling a monster_ _’s slimy mouth to make it spit them out_ because she was looking for him. He owes her _forever_.

Sakura, on the other hand, seems to think this is all _her_ responsibility. She says, “I think that opening connects with the lower opening,” and gestures to the back of the monster’s throat. “I’ll scout it out.”

On the one hand: Kairi would really rather _not_ traipse through a monster’s insides. There’s no guarantee that opening doesn’t lead straight down into its stomach, where it _digests things_.

On the other hand: does she really want to let Sakura go off on her own? Sasuke used the darkness, and they left Konoha together; it’s a safe bet to assume they’re working together now, too, which means Sakura might be working with Maleficent and the Heartless. That makes her a _bad guy_ , and Kairi should keep an eye on her.

And, on a borrowed third hand: Sora might be lost somewhere in there. Kairi _can’t_ let Sakura find him alone. So far, Sakura hasn’t done anything dangerous or bad or even suspicious, but that doesn’t mean Kairi trusts her, let alone trusts her with _Sora_.

“I’ll go with you,” Kairi says, and smiles in the face of Sakura’s poorly hidden irritation.

“It’ll be safer if you stay with the others,” Sakura tries. “We’ve seen Heartless wander in from deeper inside Monstro.”

Kairi blinks in feigned confusion. “If there’s Heartless, won’t it be safer if we go together?” Not that Kairi plans to use her keyblade or her knives—either one would give away too much.

But magic should be safe enough, and Kairi _can_ cast without using her keyblade to focus her spells. Plus, there are the gifts the women in her dream gave her. (Those might not be real, but they felt real at the time, and Kairi won’t know until she tests them. She didn’t get a chance to in Traverse Town.)

“I can take care of myself,” Sakura says. Unlike most of the boys Kairi knows, she says it as a fact, not a boast or a challenge. “I’m not sure I could keep you safe at the same time, though.”

Kairi’s smile returns. “Oh. Well, I know some magic, and I’ve fought the Heartless before. I should be fine. I might even be able to help you!”

“Kairi _is_ good at magic,” Aerith says, eyes twinkling. She doesn’t qualify the statement, either.

Kairi ducks her head to hide her warm cheeks and the real smile that spills over her face. Aerith’s magic is different from Donald’s, but she’s at least close to the same level, if not his equal. That compliment has _weight_.

Sakura changes tack. “Then she should stay here and keep Geppetto and Pinocchio safe.”

Aerith pretends to think about that—this time, Kairi’s sure it’s fake. “Hm. I agree that someone needs to stay here with them, but… I think they’ll be fine with just me and Cid.” She turns to Geppetto. “How about we move anything you want to keep onto our ship? If the Heartless attack, Cid and I can protect you, and then we can be ready to go when Sakura and Kairi are done with their job.”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Geppetto says.

Pinocchio is less thrilled. “I wanna go with Sakura and Kairi…”

Kairi knows how it feels to be left behind because you’re little and the bigger kids are worried that taking you along on their adventures will get you hurt. It never feels fair. So she kneels down to look Pinocchio in the eye, and she says, “Of course you do. Moving boxes and things is way more boring than where we’re going.”

Pinocchio looks hopeful; Geppetto makes a worried sound, but Kairi ignores him. As a dad, he won’t understand. “Would it be better if you had a really important job, instead of moving things?”

Kairi got very good at talking other kids and even some adults into things, and since Riku left for ninja school, she’s only gotten better. Not because Riku would see through her, but because Riku had shielded her from a lot of worrying and concerns, either because the adults around them were so much more worried about what he was up to (almost never anything truly objectionable) or because they trusted that he could take care of his friends. Without him around, all the kids were under more scrutiny, and that made some of them cautious.

But Kairi remembers a story her grandmother told her. About a boy who was so lazy and so clever, he talked a bunch of kids into not only doing his chores, but paying him for the privilege.

She _knows_ her grandma told her the story, because she’s never been able to find it on the Islands, and when she told Riku, his eyes went big and he demanded that _they_ try that.

(It didn’t work out completely; Riku has always been a terrible liar. But they did manage to rope Sora, Wakka, Chappu, and Selphie into helping them collect all the shells off all the beaches they could reach. Kairi turned those shells into very, very clumsy window ornaments, which they sold for pity-munny, mostly to their immediate neighbors.

The munny bought them all popsicles, though, so overall, a success.)

The point is, it’s all about how you present a thing. If a little kid doesn’t want the inglorious job of carting things from point A to point B, give him a better-sounding alternative.

“What’s the job?” Pinocchio asks.

Kairi doesn’t grin, because that might give her away. Instead, she tries to look serious. “Aerith and Cid can protect your dad from the Heartless, but everyone will be safer if the Heartless can’t surprise them. You could be lookout, and warn them if you see anything suspicious.”

As a bonus, he won’t need to really _do_ anything except pay attention. He’s a little kid, so that’s not going to last, but it will keep him out from underfoot _and_ he won’t whine about it.

(Chappu has played lookout for his brother’s friends very, _very_ often.)

Pinocchio’s eyes go wide, but he says, in the tone of a kid trying to be cool, “I don’t know…” —and then his nose…extends? He looks horrified by this.

Kairi stares at it. It’s definitely longer now.

Geppetto just laughs. “Pinocchio! What would Jiminy say?”

“I should tell the truth…” Pinocchio says, with the singsong inflection of a much-repeated statement. “Alright. I’ll do it. I’ll make sure _no_ Heartless sneak up on us!”

Kairi grins, now. “Great! I think you’d have the best view from on top of this ship. Do you need help getting up there?”

“No, I can handle it!” Again, his nose gets longer. This time, he tries to cover it, although it’s too long for his hands to hide it entirely.

“How about I lift you up?” Aerith suggests, somehow ignoring the whole…face situation.

Other worlds are weird. Then again, Pinocchio’s nose is decidedly _less_ weird than the Cheshire Cat’s…everything. It’s closer to Phil’s half-man, half-goat situation. Strange, but not her problem, and not likely to _become_ her problem.

“I still think Kairi should stay here…” Sakura tries, casting a look at Geppetto for help.

Geppetto doesn’t even glance at her; he’s too busy making worried noises about Aerith handling his son.

Kairi straightens and grins at Sakura. “Well, you can let me go with you, or you can leave and hope I don’t try to follow you. Your choice.”

Sakura’s eyes narrow. “You think you could sneak up on me?”

Not a chance. “Probably not? But that doesn’t matter. Even if you know I’m there, you can’t _stop_ me.” Not without a fight, anyway, and whatever Sakura’s up to here, it doesn’t seem to involve fighting anyone. “And before you say it’s dangerous—I know, but I think I’ll be a lot safer _with_ you than on my own somewhere _behind_ you.”

Sakura concedes with a sigh. “Well, try to keep up.”

⁂

Sakura, Kairi decides, is a _liar_.

She says they’re in a whale. A whale! Konoha doesn’t even _have_ whales, and here’s Sakura, telling Kairi the giant monster—whose guts they’re trekking through—is a whale.

Kairi _knows_ from whales, okay. This? Not a whale.

Liar or not, Sakura has some idea where she’s going. Kairi follows. The first space inside the monster (which looks less throat-shaped and more cave-shaped) is populated with unfamiliar, ghost-like Heartless that Sakura lays into with a sigh.

She’s good with her staff. Maybe as good as Riku? It’s hard to judge, because Riku never went all-out in front of Kairi. Sakura never overextends, but she does pause for longer than Kairi ever would in a fight, letting opportunities to attack pass.

Kairi, true to her word, sticks to Fire and Thunder and Blizzard spells, and the odd Cure when Sakura takes a hit. It’s overkill, but whatever, Kairi’s proving she’s good with magic.

Too caught up on making sure Sakura _notices_ her magic, Kairi loses track of one of the Heartless. She realizes her mistake when long, icy fingers grab her shoulder.

She yelps.

 _Just barely_ , Kairi remembers not to summon her keyblade to smack the hand off her. She tries to break free—it avoids her backhand easily—and, for a second, her vision grays out, like she’s about to faint.

She reaches for magic, for _something_ , not concentrating enough to really form the Thunder spell she would _love_ to blast this thing with. She hears Sakura call out…something. Muddled words. The Heartless jerks, lets go of Kairi, and color rushes back in, along with sound and smell and _pain_ where her burned shoulder protests being grabbed like that.

Before Kairi can collect herself, though, a burnished orange blur snarls into the space between Kairi and the Heartless. It leaps onto the ghost and tears it apart.

When the Heartless dissipates, the blur coalesces into a big, big cat. Bigger-than-Kairi big. It turns around and trots over to stand at Kairi’s back, hissing at the Heartless Sakura has yet to finish off.

Hissing. Like a housecat might, only with tiger-sized vocal cords.

Warning the threat away from Kairi’s back.

Apparently, her dreams _were_ more than dreams—at least, that one was. It must have been real on some level if Jasmine’s tiger is here, in a space-monster however many worlds away from Jasmine, just to watch Kairi’s back.

She must have reached for that protection without realizing it. Well, now she knows; she should be able to do it on purpose next time.

(And if Rajah is real and here and helping, then the other girls might have also given Kairi something. She doesn’t remember clearly now what they said; she’ll need to practice, to see how this new ability works.

Sora is going to be _so jealous_. Serves him right for leaving her by herself!)

When Sakura finally sweeps her staff into the last Heartless’s head, sending it careening into the wall with an unpleasant wet squelch before it disappears, the tiger relaxes. It butts its giant head into the backs of Kairi’s knees, rubbing there for a second, and then huffs a little before it, too, disappears.

“Bye, Rajah,” Kairi says softly.

Sakura’s expression, when Kairi glances over at her, is thoughtful, the way Sora’s parents size up the waves before letting any of the little kids swim out with their little-kid surfboards. Not _sure_ she’s looking at something dangerous, but aware of the possibility.

The look smooths away when Kairi meets Sakura’s eyes, replaced with wide-eyed amazement. “No wonder you weren’t worried about coming with me,” she says, not even a hint of an edge to her tone

Riku, Kairi knows, went off to Konoha and got better at lying. He still isn’t _good_ at it, but he’d been abysmal before, and he’s only lived there for a few years. Sakura lived there her whole life. She _must_ be better.

Lucky Kairi saw her face, then; lucky Kairi knows better than to trust her, after what Sasuke did. Otherwise, Kairi might’ve been fooled.

“I’m still getting the hang of it,” Kairi says, ducking her head and looking up at Sakura through her eyelashes in a way that her mother calls “cute” and Riku and Sora call “unfair cheating.” (As opposed to Sora’s puppy eyes, which are cheating but not, for some reason the boys can never explain, _unfair_.) “If you weren’t here, I’d be ghost chow. Thanks, Sakura.”

Sakura blinks, startled, and smiles, a brief flash of satisfaction before she smooths her expression out again. “Oh, don’t mention it,” she says. “I’m not that good, myself. It’s probably good that we have each other.”

That is a blatant lie, but Kairi pretends to buy it, beaming at the other girl and crowding into her space. Not as much as Selphie regularly does—Selphie’s favorite tactic is _limpet_ —and Kairi doesn’t even latch onto Sakura’s arm.

“Let’s keep going, then,” Kairi says, channeling as much of Sora’s good cheer into her tone as she can.

⁂

They do not find Sora. They _do_ find a massive Heartless with a cage for a stomach and fists like barrels. It tries to pound them into paste. They do not let it.

Here’s the problem: Sakura and Kairi are both, obviously, hiding most of their abilities. Kairi knows this; Sakura must still have suspicions. They both pay a little too much attention to what they’re doing, what the other girl is doing, and not enough attention to what the floor is doing, so when a hole opens underneath them, they both tumble down.

They drop onto the deck of Geppetto’s ship.

Kairi groans, and tosses a Cure out for good measure—the landing jarred her bruises and burned arm, and it doesn’t hurt to heal Sakura at the same time.

“Nice landing,” Sakura says. Kairi freezes, but the other girl isn’t even looking at her; instead, she’s inspecting the two exits that lead back into the monster’s guts.

Before Kairi can say anything—at this point, they’ve trekked through enough of the monster that there’s really only one place left to look for Sora before Kairi can leave—an alarmed shout interrupts: “Pinocchio! Let go of my son!”

They turn, in time to see the cage-Heartless scuttle _along the side of the wall_ , avoiding blasts of magic as it goes. A well-thrown spear manages to tear into one of its arms, but even that only slows it down: it tugs the arm free of the spear and continues toward the higher entrance.

When Kairi goes to shoot a Thunder spell at the retreating form, Sakura grabs her by the elbow. “You’ll hit Pinocchio,” she says, shaking Kairi a bit, and she sounds so serious, so sincere, that Kairi pauses and stares at her.

If Kairi had no idea who this girl was, she would honestly think Sakura’s concerned. Nothing in her tone or expression gives anything else away.

By the time Kairi recovers, the Heartless is long gone, and Geppetto is sobbing into Cid’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” is all Kairi can say; that, and, “we’ll get him back.”

Sakura opens her mouth, then shuts it without saying anything. She surveys their gummi ship, eyes up Aerith and Cid, and says, “You two should stay here. Keep Geppetto safe and be ready to leave as soon as Kairi and I get Pinocchio back.”

“Absolutely not,” Aerith says. “Cid needs to stay with the ship, but I’ll go with you.”

Cid looks pained at this, but he has a sobbing man clinging to him, and he _is_ the best pilot.

Sakura shakes her head. “If the Heartless come back here, we need one person to defend Geppetto and one person to defend the ship.”

“Geppetto can stay _in_ the ship.”

“Aerith,” Kairi cuts in. “Sakura and I are going to need to climb up to that opening.” She gestures, indicating the path they’ll need to take across the wooden structures, all of it leading to the upper exit on the other side of the monster’s mouth. “We need to get to Pinocchio quickly, before the Heartless hurts him.”

Sakura is a ninja, and Kairi has extensive obstacle-climbing experience. Plus, they can both use chakra to stick to surfaces, so there’s little chance either of them will fall. Aerith, on the other hand…

Aerith unhappily concedes.

“Follow me,” Sakura says, “and let me know if you need help.”

Sakura keeps her jumps close to normal—they’re a bit too high, but Kairi doesn’t say anything, just follows behind. Riku never taught Kairi or Sora how to jump as high as ninja can, because he knew they’d do something reckless with it and get hurt, but he did teach them how to soften their landings. Watching Sakura—who doesn’t use any hand seals—there must be some way to channel chakra into the leg muscles…

Now’s not the time or place for experimentation, though.

Twice, Kairi messes up her leaps; she would miss her landings if Sakura didn’t reach out and catch her, both times. (Though, if she were alone, Kairi would have tried to catch herself with chakra; in this situation, where time is a factor, she would’ve just run across the side of the monster’s mouth like the Heartless did.)

Sakura’s brow furrows the first time she hauls Kairi up and onto the ledge; the second time, Kairi senses the intrusion of foreign chakra, but only in time to notice it leaving.

Sakura says nothing, though, just tugs Kairi along after her.

The upper opening leads to a small, tall chamber filled with mushroom-shaped Heartless that Sakura ignores. In fact, the only thing Sakura pays any attention to, besides the upward progression, is Kairi—after every leap to a new platform, Sakura waits for Kairi to join her. Even without giving her ninja abilities away, Sakura could move faster, get to Pinocchio quicker, but instead, she makes sure that Kairi’s not falling behind.

It would be sweet if it weren’t so frustrating.

One good body flicker and _either_ of them would be with Pinocchio by now! But _no_ , they both have to pretend they aren’t capable of just dashing up the gross, squishy walls.

If Pinocchio’s hurt because Kairi was being cautious, she won’t be able to face his father. (On the other hand, if Kairi tips Sakura off and the girl attacks her, she might not ever _see_ Geppetto again. If Sakura is as powerful as Sasuke.)

Luckily, they make it to the top without incident, and Pinocchio looks scared but not actually injured, with his little hands wrapped around the “bars” keeping him trapped inside the Heartless.

“Ah, Sakura, Kairi! Get me out of here!”

“We’re going to!” Kairi calls back to him. Then she bites her lip, turns to Sakura. “Any ideas?”

Sakura looks at the Heartless for several heartbeats, then turns to Kairi. “I have a few.”

Since Sakura’s the one with a non-secret weapon, and Kairi’s magic _might hurt Pinocchio_ , Kairi asks, impatiently, “Mind sharing?”

“Well,” Sakura says, slowly, thoughtfully, “the easiest way would be for you to trade yourself for him. That would be best for everyone, I think.”

Kairi stills; even the air in her lungs seems to chill. “What?”

Sakura points her staff at Kairi, and green fire licks around the edges of the room, cutting off any escape routes. “It took me a while to figure out,” she admits. “Sasuke didn’t really give me a description. But you’re the keyblade wielder, aren’t you? From Traverse Town?”

When Kairi fought Sasuke, she wasn’t alone; it was her, Sora, Donald, and Goofy against one boy. They lost— _badly_. Now, Kairi is down all her allies and has to consider Pinocchio’s safety; she can’t just attack indiscriminately, not that it would do her much good.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kairi tries, hoping to buy time to think.

Sakura smirks at her. “Then explain that magic you used earlier. It’s not like any other magic I’ve seen before.” A pause, and her expression hardens. “Did Hatake teach you that?”

Maybe, if Kairi had gone to ninja school, she could keep trying to play dumb. Maybe she’d be able to stall long enough to think of a way out of all this. As it is, she gives up the pretense and falls into a fighting stance, summoning Destiny’s Embrace.

Before Sakura can attack, though, a whistling sound cuts through the air, utterly unlike the sloshing and rumbling of the monster around them. It’s followed quickly by a sizzle, and then—

And then Cid lands heavily in the space between Kairi and Sakura. He sets Aerith down on her feet and brandishes his spear.

“This looks like a party,” Aerith says, brushing off her skirt. Her own staff is at the ready, and she looks back over her shoulder at Kairi, smiles. “We didn’t want to miss all the fun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter. THIS CHAPTER. This is what hiatus'd the story (I mean, besides the external factors, of course); I have redone this sequence of scenes four or five times, which puts it up with the early Chuunin Exams in terms of editing stalling out the story posting.
> 
> In better news! In an effort to scrape what I consider a decent total wordcount for the year despite taking four months completely off writing, I have managed to get back my buffer and then some. 
> 
> (You might have noticed the chapter total changed again. That's because up through chapter 14 is written, and ahaha we have a bunch of plot threads to wrap up before we get to the end. Right now my guesstimate is "not more than 20" but WHO KNOWS, not this author, I'm just desperately clutching my current outline/endgame plan and trying not to let it slip through my fingers. There IS an outline, I say, weeping, as Aerith and Cid elbow their way into what would have been a chapter-long miniboss fight.)
> 
> So chapter 12 will be posted **next Friday, January 8th** , and unless it undergoes major revisions, it is currently quite a bit shorter than this chapter but also where we start to see some comfort for all this hurt I've piled on everyone. A world that several commenters have asked about will make an appearance, for one thing.
> 
> 2020 has been a really rough year, and I cannot thank you all enough. Those of you who have stuck with this story from the beginning, those of you who have found it along the way, everyone who has left comments or kudos or bookmarks, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. May 2021 be better to everyone. Have a great, safe new year, and take care! 💖💖💖


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